Secluded in Rehoboth, Biden stews at allies’ pressure to drop out of the race

WASHINGTON — Sick with COVID and abandoned by allies, President Joe Biden has been fuming at his Delaware beach house, increasingly resentful about what he sees as an orchestrated campaign to drive him out of the race and bitter toward some of those he once considered close, including his onetime running mate Barack Obama.

Biden has been around politics long enough to assume that the leaks appearing in the media in recent days are being coordinated to raise the pressure on him to step aside, according to people close to him. He considers Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, the main instigator but is irritated at Obama as well, seeing him as a puppet master behind the scenes.

The friction between the sitting president and leaders of his own party so close to an election is unlike anything seen in Washington in generations — especially because the Democrats now working to ease him out were some of the allies most critical to his success over the last dozen years. It was Obama who elevated Biden from a presidential also-ran to the vice presidency, setting him up to win the White House in 2020, and it was Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, who pushed through Biden’s landmark legislative achievements.

But several people close to Biden, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters, described an under-the-weather president coughing and hacking hundreds of miles from the corridors of power as his presidency meets its most perilous moment.

He has watched with rising exasperation as a succession of news stories appeared, one after the other, reporting that Schumer, Pelosi, Obama and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, all had warned of a devastating defeat for the party in November.

And he certainly noticed that neither Obama nor former President Bill Clinton had done much to help him in recent days even as their own former aides publicly led the way in calling on him to withdraw in what were interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as messages from the former presidents’ camps.

The unseen but clearly felt presence of Obama in particular has brought a Shakespearean quality to the drama now playing out, given their eight-year partnership.

While Biden and his team publicly insist that he is staying in the race, privately, people close to him have said that he is increasingly accepting that he may not be able to, and some have begun discussing dates and venues for a possible announcement that he is stepping aside.

In privately railing about Obama and Clinton, Biden has made clear that he finds it particularly rich, as two people close to the situation put it, that the two presidents who were architects of historic Democratic losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections would be lecturing him about how to save the party after he presided over a better-than-expected midterm in 2022. Another person said Obama’s suspected involvement has made it worse.

“We have to cauterize this wound right now, and the sooner we can do it, the better,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., who has not publicly called for the president to step aside.

“I mean, to me, this is very painful. I think it just shows the cold calculus of politics.”

More congressional Democrats publicly called on the president Friday to pass the torch to another candidate to take on former President Donald Trump in the fall. Among them were Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and at least nine House Democrats, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a close ally of Pelosi, her fellow Californian.

The fact that Pelosi’s allies have been coming out is seen as no coincidence at the president’s vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. When another of her allies, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, spoke out earlier this week, a Biden administration official noted that it might be Schiff’s lips moving, but it was Pelosi doing the speaking.

It has not just been her allies. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. and a Pelosi rival, said Friday that Biden, “a mentor and friend” who had helped him get elected to the House in 2014, “didn’t seem to recognize me” when they met at the D-Day anniversary commemoration in France last month.

“Of course, that can happen as anyone ages, but as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Moulton wrote in The Boston Globe.

Biden pushed back Friday with a statement vowing to continue the race. “I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” he said.

© 2024 The New York Times Company