Opinions | Forget about defeating Trump. Biden needs to save the country for another four years.

Now that the first 2024 general election debate has erased any doubt about the need to remove President Biden from the Democratic ticket, you will hear many serious liberals making the case for removing Biden primarily to defeat Donald Trump. Biden must resign, the argument goes, because he will lose the election and only another Democrat can save the country from Trump’s misrule.

This is a necessary argument for its target audience: Americans who fear Trump more than anything and a Democratic Party driven by partisan interests. It’s clear that continuing to support Biden now would give Trump the best chance for an easy win — an even better chance than nominating Kamala Harris, who might be a terrible candidate but will still be better than her boss at this time. Certainly, if you believe America needs to be saved from Trumpism 2.0, continuing to support Biden is a serious fall from grace.

But it’s important, especially for those of us who are not Democrats, to emphasize that rejecting Biden’s nomination is essential not just if you hope to avoid a second Trump term. It’s essential if you want to protect the country from a second Biden term—from the ways in which his apparent degradation endangers the country he nominally leads.

In other words, if a genie or fairy godmother appeared to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Jill Biden and blessed them with the ability to predict that Biden would somehow win against Trump, the prospect of another four years of Biden as president would be enough to spur some serious action right now.

Here, the constant comparison to a figure like Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not enough. Ginsburg’s long tenure was a sin against her own liberal principles, which suffered a crushing defeat when a Republican president appointed her replacement. But the decline of a Supreme Court justice is more manageable and less dangerous to the court and the country than the decline of an American president.

Yes, presidential aides and cabinet members can manage some aspects of a fading CEO’s job. But they are not law clerks leisurely drafting opinions. Their boss is at the center of a global network of alliances; command the world’s most powerful military, including a vast nuclear deterrent; and tasked with maintaining the Pax Americana now under threat from a coalition of revisionist powers. The entire global order would be threatened if there was an empty ship in the Oval Office, a headless superpower in an unstable world.

Back in the days when presidential unfitness was a novelty, I made this argument about Trump. Before his election in 2016, i warning that our opponents will be eager to test a president without experience or self-discipline and that “he just needs to be himself to bring a prolonged period of risk to the world.” Early in his term, i worry that having “a man who doesn’t know what he’s doing in almost every aspect of the presidency” has made a conflict in the Middle East much more likely.

Mine warning The dangers of a presidential power vacuum found some vindication as Trump floundered and floundered in the early months of the pandemic. But geopolitically, the challenges were fortunately not as severe, and Trump groped his way to a more effective foreign policy than I expected. A Biden apologist today might even argue that Trump’s first term showed that the American empire can survive an incompetent president…

… except that under Biden, the severity of the geopolitical tests has increased. Many of the options his administration has taken to respond are reasonable or at least defensible, and his team has done a good job of maneuvering around the president’s tighter constraints. But for the same reason that Trump’s incompetence seems dangerous, it seems plausible that Biden’s weakness has emboldened our enemies, and is partly responsible for the severity of the challenges we face.

That’s essentially the argument Trump made in the debate: that he’s more respected by our adversaries and that the world is therefore more stable under his watch. Whether or not that’s been true over the past few years, based on what Biden showed the world on Thursday, I think it will be true if he remains in office until 2028. By that crucial measure, his ability to lead a superpower without the 25th Amendment hanging over his back, he seems no less incompetent than Trump, but more so.

This reality does not erase Trump’s incompetence on other fronts, especially the stain of January 6. It only means that a second Biden administration would be unusually dangerous for the country in a very specific and very important way. And replacing him with another Democratic candidate, however difficult it may seem, would save America from the significant dangers of Biden’s victory, not just from the risk of his defeat. ta.