One Year Later: The Night That Blew Up the Biden Campaign — and My Last Shred of Certainty

Twelve months later, I’m still recovering from the worst debate performance in history.

Ah, June 27, 2024. The night Joe Biden shuffled into a CNN studio and stumbled out of the presidential race.

The night he muttered the immortal phrase, “Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with ... look ... if... we finally beat Medicare.”

It was like watching a man lose a knife fight with his own tongue — in front of 50 million people.

And here's the (deeply humbling) part: One day earlier, I went on TV touting a column I had written about how Team Biden had outmaneuvered Team Trump. Yep.

The argument was that Biden’s team had dictated the terms of the debate — the timing, the rules, the muted microphones — and Donald Trump, somehow, had just let it happen.

That was all true. Still is.

But facts are cold comfort when you’ve just staked your credibility on the political equivalent of a domestic turkey trying to fly.

Some people thought muting Trump’s microphone would help Biden — make Trump look like a bully yelling at an old man (that is essentially what happened in 2020). The argument was that Biden, without interruptions to hide behind, would have nowhere to run.

I argued the opposite: Biden was old and confused. If Trump was allowed to interrupt him and fluster him, it could be chaotic and pathetic.

Turns out, those concerns were well placed. Except, the microphones didn’t really factor into it. It wasn’t just a sad performance. It was a televised cognitive collapse.

Now, in fairness to Biden’s strategy folks, there was a logic to the early debate date.

It was unprecedented, sure — general election debates usually don’t roll around until fall — but Team Biden needed to shake things up. They saw June as a chance to reboot a sagging campaign... or — if necessary — reboot the candidate himself.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Biden face-planted, the party panicked, and a few weeks (and emergency meetings) later, he dropped out. Poof. Gone.

All because his team, in some 4D chess move, set up a debate designed to test him — and he failed the test in front of the entire country. (Note: If your candidate is going to utterly collapse, it’s better for it to happen in June than in October.)

At the time, you could almost admire the Machiavellian gall of it: Use Biden to lure Republicans into a false sense of security, then swap in a newer, shinier model at the eleventh hour.

The old bait-and-switch. For a hot second, it even looked like it might work.

But in the end, it didn’t. Kamala Harris fizzled, and Biden’s meltdown remained the defining image — the one Republicans turned into a campaign ad before the closing credits rolled.

It turns out it’s hard to claim you “won the chess match” when your player is drooling on live television.

So here we are, one year later. Biden’s gone, Trump’s not, and (coincidentally) my last column for The Daily Beast was titled: “Biden’s Re-Election Is Doomed by Disastrous Debate.”

At least I got that part right.

Politics is a cruel, chaotic business. You try to make sense of it, spin some grand theory, maybe even get a little too clever — and then the president of the United States says he wants to “beat Medicare.”

And just like that, your column — and your confidence — go up in flames.