On "Forbes Newsroom," presidential historian Alexis Coe talks to Forbes senior editor Maggie McGrath about why President Biden should consider dropping out not just from the 2024 election, but from the presidency as a whole.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath with Forbes Breaking News. Over the weekend, President
00:07Joe Biden announced that he will not be seeking re-election in 2024, and instead he endorsed
00:14his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the nominee for the Democratic Party. Here to
00:19explain this moment in time and a piece that she wrote about why Biden should actually
00:24resign the presidency is presidential historian Alexis Coe. Alexis, thank you so much for
00:30joining us.
00:31Thank you for having me.
00:32Okay, so on Friday, you wrote, and the headline is, Biden should resign the presidency to
00:38save his legacy. Take us through this argument. Why did you write this? Why do you think this?
00:45As a presidential historian, I really love finding some fact that we take to be true
00:53and then dismantling it. I can find the origin. I can find the progenitor of the untruth,
01:00and I can bury this narrative in a mountain of citations. It's a lot of fun. I enjoy it,
01:10and it makes a little bit of a difference, but I am Sisyphus. The second I go to sleep,
01:18the boulder rolls down the hill, and I push it right back up because the reality is that
01:23it has ossified over hundreds of years. I am always at least a century too late, but
01:29I usually see that in the past. This is a slow process. It happens when I'm alone in
01:34a room or in an archive. To watch it in real time has been staggering. I've never seen
01:40anything like it in my lifetime, and so it got to the point where the weeks went on and
01:46first I was saying, oh, it's just a bad debate. A lot of presidents have bad debates. Reagan had
01:51a terrible first debate. Made a good joke. Everything was fine after, but then it was
01:56clear that we just hadn't seen Joe Biden in a long time in this kind of way and that he
02:02had been managed. I began to think about his legacy and what it was doing to it.
02:06What is the precedent, if any, for Biden resigning the presidency? Are there other
02:14examples that we should know about? There's almost none in this particular case. Certainly,
02:21we heard a lot about the 25th Amendment when Trump was president. A president can be removed
02:27for different reasons. A president can resign. Nixon resigned. We're used to resignations
02:33happening on the heels of some sort of scandal, and that's not necessarily what this is. I
02:43still think it might be the right move, but I've been happy to see the reaction to Biden.
02:50I was dismayed also to see the double standard. So many people were bemoaning that, for example,
02:57the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of the publications. After the debate, it
03:02was like it was a debate with one person, and all they did was focus on Biden. Biden
03:06must step down. Biden must step aside. And there was no focus on Trump whatsoever.
03:13And now that has shifted a little bit, and we see this slight course correction,
03:22but there's still a lot of problems with what it took to get him there.
03:28My theory is, and it's just a working theory, it's based actually not on a historian,
03:33but on a scientist, Daniel Cunningham, the late Nobel Prize winner, said in Thinking Fast and
03:39Slow that endings matter. So if you have a terrible two days, but they're the last two
03:45days of your vacation, and the previous 12 were amazing, you're still going to remember it as
03:52not a great vacation. And so I think if everything goes the way of the Biden administration,
03:58which will now be the continuity, will be the Harris administration, he will go down as
04:05being an ally to the only two presidents of color for the first 250 years of America's history.
04:13But if that doesn't happen, that chapter in his book will now be half the book, that he waited
04:20too long, that he was stubborn, there will be all these facts that come out. So as far as his
04:25legacy, it looks really good right now. But we're still in the throes of things, as we know,
04:31it's been a really wild ride. I see. So effectively, what you're arguing at this moment,
04:37and he published this on Friday, before he officially stepped out of the race, those
04:40signals were kind of indicating that he might be thinking of leaning that way. You're basically
04:46saying he's getting a lot of accolades right now. But if Vice President Harris receives the
04:51nomination and goes on to compete in the general and then loses to former President Trump, that
04:58muddies President Biden's legacy. And to secure his legacy, he should just step down now and give
05:04us a President Harris. I think that still might be while an extreme move, it still might be
05:11necessary, because what hasn't happened, that's essential is the party has not fallen behind Kamala
05:17Harris, what we see is 500 and counting delegates within hours. But Biden, even the day before,
05:25people were still saying, and he was still saying when I was home with COVID, that he was not going
05:29to give up, that he's going to fight till the end. And so the issue we have now is that there's a very
05:34good chance that she will be primaried. Barack Obama has not endorsed her. He gave this sort of
05:41vague endorsement. He praised Biden, but it was vague. And maybe, you know, if we're looking at
05:47this in the sunniest of terms, he perhaps wanted Kamala Harris to get the endorsement from Biden,
05:54let that settle, let everything else come in, and then he does it. But I just can't see that.
06:00And what we do know is from the 60s and the 70s, Gerald Ford with Reagan, and Jimmy Carter
06:09with Ted Kennedy, that if an incumbent, which essentially she is, she's been the second for the
06:15last, you know, four years, if an incumbent is primaried, they might suffer through the convention
06:21and do okay, but they will not come out stronger, and in fact, a lot weaker. Being internally attacked
06:29hurts more, it's a little bit more biting, and it's a little bit more truthful than we usually
06:34see attacks from the outside. So it will be possibly devastating. It will definitely hurt her.
06:41But we do have at the same time, this question, and Trump just announced his VP at the, you know,
06:47the first day of the convention. We don't know who her VP is, we think right now, but we don't know.
06:53So there's still so many questions, and it's an evolving situation. And frankly, while a little
06:59bit stressful, and certainly taking all our attention, it seems like it's the excitement
07:06that everyone needed. You know, we had this sort of geriatric race going, and I don't usually say
07:12this, but Nikki Haley was right. She's not great on American history, but she was right. She said
07:17that, you know, whoever doesn't have the 80-year-old candidate will suddenly get all the attention and
07:24do quite well. So, so far, gotta hand it to Haley. It's interesting, because we saw from the
07:30Fundraising Platform Act blue that as of 9pm Sunday night, close to $50 million had been raised
07:38from grassroots campaign support, regular people donating small dollar amounts. That seemed to
07:43indicate a significant amount of enthusiasm. It was, at that point, the largest one-day total for
07:49the 2024 election. But in your view, you talked about Vice President Harris doesn't have all the
07:57delegates yet. So you, you're kind of looking at the landscape as it exists right now and seeing a
08:02more fractured picture than what some of these fundraising totals would indicate?
08:07Yes, I mean, fits and starts, right? Very impressive for the first day or two, but she's
08:12got a very late start. And she's catching up to Trump, and he's done quite well. So, so we have to
08:21wait and see what happens. It's still, it's really touch and go at this point. But I think that
08:28the response has been quite good. Trump has said that he will not debate Harris. I think that
08:35debate, well, often I say debates don't really matter. And they don't, historically speaking,
08:41it's like early polling, the polls don't even start to matter for another, you know, month or so.
08:46But we're in a different landscape right now. And it seems like people will tune in because they
08:52don't know Harris that well. The reality of the vice presidency, John Adams called it the most
08:59irreverent office, you know, irrelevant office that his people had ever, you know, deigned to
09:04conceive of. And she has been present, but certainly not the way Joe Biden was president,
09:10present when he was the vice president, and he was Barack Obama's buddy. So we haven't seen her be
09:17quite as active. I have to say, though, I'm at a think tank in Washington, D.C., and I have
09:23always been shocked by the incongruous narratives I hear in the rest of the country when I travel
09:28around as a senior fellow during discussions tours. I hear nothing really about Kamala Harris.
09:35And then when I'm in D.C., there are all these stories about how she just went abroad and she
09:40ran this conference and that meeting and this, and she was so great. So we have to see some of
09:46that. And it's got to be either in the news or the way American politics works now, a good late
09:54night show with Trump. Or to the point of your op-ed, as president, if Biden were to resign.
10:02Now, I have to ask you, we've seen some calls from the right for the invocation of the 25th
10:08Amendment. Do you think Vice President Harris should invoke the 25th Amendment right now?
10:13And for those who aren't familiar with it, can you explain what it is?
10:17The 25th Amendment is basically a safety net for America. If the president in some way cannot
10:24function, that either Congress or the president can resign. There are measures in which Biden
10:29can be replaced by Harris. It gets tricky. Now, I will say that at the same time that some of the
10:37Republicans are calling for that, other Republicans are saying this is illegal. He must stay in the
10:41race. He cannot step down. The Speaker of the House is. And so we see an unusually fractured
10:50party for Republicans. Whatever it is, they usually fall in line, questioning and challenging. That's
10:55more of a Democratic attribute. So that's been really interesting. However, I think it's notable
11:04and people aren't really talking about it as much. And I'm going to sound a bit like a
11:09conspiracy theorist and I don't mean to, but I think it's a little bit strange that Biden hasn't
11:13shown his face yet and that he didn't make this announcement in some well-orchestrated press
11:19conference. He has COVID. OK, but it must be really bad. And so unless we hear something about
11:26that or these theories about the doctor visiting the White House and allegedly him having Parkinson's,
11:33if those things do turn out to be true, then I think a natural and very logical discussion that
11:39America should be having and perhaps it's going on right now in D.C. is the 25th Amendment. But
11:46for right now, it's it's a wait and see. I think I still think it would be a wise idea for his
11:54legacy because it is so dramatic. But I am fine with this happening in steps just as long as
12:02there is some progress. We can't have a double standard. You can't say one party must hold
12:09country over party and, you know, make sure that the de facto leader of the party is fit for office
12:16and then at the same time say, well, but he's so unfit that this guy who's a little bit unfit
12:22is still OK. This is not the way that a democracy can function. And so I'm glad to see people are
12:27stepping away from the double standard. When you think about the message that Biden is sending,
12:33he wants to focus on the remainder of his presidency. He's putting forth someone else
12:39to run for president again. She doesn't officially have the nomination yet, but that seems to be
12:45messaging that would support. There's a logical conclusion to resigning the presidency, perhaps.
12:51But I guess what I'm wondering is, is it an abdication of duty of Vice President Harris
12:57to not call for the 25th Amendment, if you're looking at it with that if-then scheme of thinking?
13:05If we find out that he is greatly incapacitated past what we saw at the debate and what we've seen
13:12in other instances, then she will have some serious questions and will lose the trust of
13:21the American people. That's a given. And it will be a scandal and it will increase the cynicism
13:30of the office, which has been something that I feel on a daily basis and combat all the time.
13:35I receive questions from audiences and emails. People think that the president, so the leader
13:44of the free world, is completely without a moral compass. And what Kamala Harris needs to do is
13:51bring back humanity. If she is disingenuous to such a great degree, then that is questionable.
13:59However, because of Trump, she can't really be held accountable in any way. He successfully
14:07garnered presidential immunity from the Supreme Court. So it's tricky times.
14:13I spent so many years saying there's no precedent for this, and indeed there's no precedent for this.
14:20There's no precedent for this. Even for an incapacitated president, there's no, if you go all
14:24the way back to George Washington, there's never been a moment. Oh, there has. Just no. It's been
14:29a cover-up every single time. Calvin Coolidge, for example, he's known as silent cows or slow cow.
14:35People talk about how he completely checked out. Well, if you go back to the time period and you
14:40look at his diaries and the things that are being written about him, he wouldn't know that. They
14:45wouldn't know that at the time. But now we see he was clinically depressed. His weight fluctuated
14:51wildly. He had mood swings. He slept at odd hours, sometimes all the time, sometimes none of the time.
14:58And the reason is quite obvious. It wasn't a chemical imbalance, although, of course,
15:02that might have been an issue as well. I'm not that kind of doctor, not a diagnostician, but
15:08we know a really obvious thing happened to him when he was in the White House.
15:12His teenage son died. He was playing tennis on the White House grounds. He got a blister. It
15:18turned into sepsis, and he died. And of course, Calvin Coolidge felt incredibly guilty about that
15:25happening. I think his son probably would have played tennis anywhere, and perhaps this might
15:29have happened. But it did happen there, and it happened because he was president. He was also,
15:33though, I will say, not the nicest man. So there's a lot going on there. But he checked out. We know
15:39Edith Wilson, of course, with Woodrow Wilson. There have been some very bizarre articles about
15:43how Joe Biden is basically the new Edith Wilson. We would know that. That would be far more obvious.
15:49You can't get away with that in this day and age. And she's also traveling on her own. It's not like
15:53she's on by his side all the time. Biden, his strengths can in some ways manage a not
16:02incapacitated 25th Amendment compelling sort of situation, but something that he will get credit
16:11for later that he doesn't get a lot of credit for right now because this is not the most interesting
16:15thing to talk about. It's like civil service reform with Chester A. Arthur. Nobody really
16:21gets that excited about it. But Biden is a great manager. He's had almost no loss of people around
16:28him. And there are people who have come up with him. He trusts them. They were very young during
16:32the Obama administration. I was at the Democracy Forum, and both Michelle and Barack talked a lot
16:37about that, how they're seeing people who were just kids and they were straight out of college.
16:41Now they have children. They have stuck around in jobs like secretary of state, things that people
16:46usually leave after a couple of years, or maybe as they see the president is either going to run
16:51for reelection or not. Maybe it's the end of a second term. Biden has had an incredible stinker,
16:58whereas sometimes Trump would have someone for a week and then they'd be gone in a pretty high
17:02profile situation. So the stability of the Biden administration, despite the fact that we might
17:10have a leader who is not the leader he was four years ago, it does not seem to be at the point
17:17where we should really be screaming bloody murder. What has been the reaction to your piece since it
17:24came out on Friday? Have you been hearing from Democrats or Republicans who agree with you?
17:30Yes, I had an overwhelming amount of responses. I have written a lot of op-eds in my time,
17:37many for the New York Times and places I think that get as much or more traffic than Rolling
17:43Stone. But I don't think I've ever had such a strong reaction to pieces. It was probably the
17:48closest I will ever get to a personal essay because I talked about my research and what
17:53it's like to try and combat some of these legacy issues and these false narratives.
17:59I got a lot of people saying, yes, this is important because it's not that I'm saying
18:05this guy is going to ruin his reputation. He will go down if this goes smoothly. As the most
18:11progressive president of the 21st century, he rivals FDR. He has accomplished so much. And
18:19certainly in pretty bad circumstances, we were at home, not able to leave when he took office.
18:26And then we were. That's pretty significant. Our lives drastically changed. And if we were
18:32to parentify these presidents because they are both older men and we live in a patriarchal
18:38society, we can say that it's much better to have Biden as the de facto head of your household
18:44than Trump. It was just a much it was a drastic change in his legacy that I saw. All of a sudden,
18:52none of that mattered, not even the negative parts of his legacy. Gaza, for example,
18:57nobody was talking about that anymore. And so what I think happened was there was this moment
19:04where people said this is fair. It's not just about age. It's about the bigger picture and
19:10how he has affected our lives, because I think it was really personal for people in a way that they
19:14weren't really able to express. And it was just about someone who seemed slow or, you know,
19:20arthritic or possibly having Parkinson's. And then on the flip side, there's still there was
19:26still a small number of people and, you know, gratefully small who were upset that that I would
19:32even suggest that people should not support Biden blindly and didn't really get the hypocrisy.
19:38If you're saying that the Republicans need to hold Trump accountable, Democrats need to hold
19:43Biden accountable. So there was, of course, that. But I will say that I was really excited. And then
19:49there's a lot of theories of people who work in D.C. that Biden sought, which I don't actually
19:54believe. I think he's a pretty busy man. But I do think that the most compelling argument for him,
19:59because he is a lifelong civil servant. This is not something he didn't just wake up like R.F.K.
20:05Jr. at the age of 70 and decide, oh, I think I'll be president now. He's been working at this for a
20:09long time. But that and the duality of Joe Biden, this ambitious man and everyone's ambitious.
20:15It's not a bad thing. How do you get to be president? And a lot of people, I mean,
20:20included, do not want to be president. And that was really sort of overwhelming this
20:27incredible history of service. And so that is something that I think is meaningful. And
20:34I think it is compelling to him either way. Whoever made the argument legacy is on his mind.
20:40The reaction in the aftermath, I will say, as I was doing press yesterday and today in wake of
20:46the announcement, I was surprised to constantly get questions because usually these hits are two,
20:53three minutes long, four minutes if you're on live TV. I was really surprised to get so many
20:57questions about Hunter Biden in the grand scheme of things. He is not a huge part of Biden's legacy.
21:04And the questions were kind of wild and suggest that a double standard still exists.
21:11When you talk about double standards, again, we have to emphasize Vice President Harris is not
21:16officially the nominee, but a lot of the narrative around her is she is 59.
21:20She is almost 20 years younger than the Republican candidate. So do you expect age to continue to be
21:28a factor in this race? And as a presidential historian, do you think there's maybe some
21:34groundwork for age limits in the presidency based on what we've seen in this election cycle?
21:40Absolutely. We have a lower limit of 35 because of the constitutional convention,
21:46a man named George Mason introduced it. And what I love about this anecdote is then George Mason
21:51decided he got that through. He argued that point. People disagreed with him. He said,
21:55you know, he said, I won't sign it unless you have that in. The framers put it in and then it got to
22:03signing time. What did George Mason do? He didn't sign it. He decided not to because he didn't agree
22:08with other things, particularly slavery. So then this still exists because at 35, George Mason
22:14thought he wasn't mature enough. So this is also just based on a single person. And I, you know,
22:19George Washington, when I think about him around 26, I don't think so. 35, 36, maybe really depends
22:28on the individual. JFK was one of our youngest presidents. He was not president at 35, but he
22:36started to think about it then. He also had 10 years in Congress, though. There are a lot of
22:40things that we should codify. And the founders and the framers also believed that people would
22:45naturally serve in Congress at some point during those 35 years, at least for one term, so that
22:52they would understand, you know, how a bill becomes a law. And we haven't seen that. The
22:57other thing I will say is that George Washington left office after two terms. That was his own
23:02personal choice. Nobody told him he had to. And in fact, even though most of the founders were
23:07frenemies of his at that point, they were still really interested in him staying in office because
23:12he created stability. And he said, no, I don't want this to look like I'm a king. If I die in
23:19office, that sets a precedent. People will continue to be in office until they're quite
23:22old. And the only reason I entered office as an older man is because I was fighting the revolution.
23:28Just timing. It wasn't great. But we see a lot of notes in his diaries and in letters to people.
23:35He talks about how things are hurting. He's not the man he once was, and he wants to exit
23:41gracefully. He didn't want to cling on to power.
23:46He didn't want to cling on to power. So there is a degree to which we heard that from President
23:51Biden on Sunday. Alexis, I want to ask as the final question to this interview, what is your
23:56prediction over what we'll see over the next three months? Do you think he'll take the advice
24:02of your op ed and and resign the presidency and we'll see a President Harris before November?
24:10That would certainly be a fantasy. It would be a bit of fan fiction,
24:17not quite the fan fiction that came out on Sunday. I have to say the news came within hours. I don't
24:22think it was my op ed, but it might have been Sorkin's op ed because he published one in the
24:28Times that was really the only apt word choice. It's bonkers. He thought that Mitt Romney, who I
24:35think two to five percent of Americans still believe his first name is Mittens, that he should
24:39be president, that the Democrats should elect Mitt Romney. And so that was really quite an extreme
24:45reaction. I think that if covid takes a real toll on him, if we don't see him by the end of the week,
24:53that people should be pushing for question, you know, they should be pushing for answers and they
24:58should be asking very specific questions. And it's possible things seem to be moving quickly.
25:04We saw him a lot last year. You know, this will come out in the years to come and we'll understand
25:09the exact timeline of when he started to sort of be at this diminished state. Right now,
25:16he's not the Joe Biden that he was, but he's not unfit for office. So we'll see about that.
25:24Certainly not running, not going to rallies, not keeping this kind of schedule that he was not
25:29keeping, but he was definitely had an amplified schedule. That should be a little bit easier on
25:34him. But we don't know. We have not actually seen him for that long for outside of the debate.
25:42And then we'll see how Harris responds to this doing double duty, because it is not an easy
25:48thing to be vice president and who she selects as as her VP while she's campaigning. Those are a lot
25:55of hats. There is so much that has to happen over the next 100 days and change. And Alexis Coe,
26:04we thank you for joining us to explain at least what we've seen over the last
26:0824 to 36 hours. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.