Joe Biden had many lucid moments at his Thursday evening press conference, but the idea that we’re going to judge Biden day by day on the latest speech or press conference is terrifying, for two reasons. First, it sets a ludicrously low bar that is bound to favor standing pat with Biden as the nominee. This is because every one of these appearances is going to be judged on whether he was better than he was at the June 27 debate, and every time, the answer to that question is almost certain to be yes, because he can hardly be worse. But is “He was better than the debate” really the right standard here?

Second, this clock is ticking. It’s five weeks until the Democratic convention, which opens Monday, August 19. That’s time enough to act. Biden did open the door just a crack Thursday night to not being the nominee, but mainly he sounded very dug in, and if that’s the case, he can run out that clock by doing just enough interviews and speeches to be able to say he didn’t go into hiding, but without genuinely exposing himself to a risky public situation. One can predict the news cycles: three days of sensing that the dam may be about to burst and the Democrats are ready to take collective action, then Biden makes an appearance, does OK but only OK, but the momentum for replacing him is killed.

So if that’s how we’re going to spend these next five weeks, Biden will be the nominee. Is there a chance he can win? There is. Lots of Americans really don’t like Donald Trump. In 10 long weeks between the end of the convention and Election Day, maybe the Democrats can succeed in making the race about Trump, and Biden can eke out a win. A poll came out Friday morning showing Biden ahead by two points.

But the odds are growing that Biden will lead his party to a defeat that will extend to both chambers of Congress. That means that Trump, armed with the radical proposals of Project 2025, a self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” who has a list of some 350 people who may be arrested in a new Trump term, and a fresh Supreme Court ruling that makes all this presumably legal, will return to the Oval Office with Republican majorities in the Senate and House, the latter of which Democrats had been confident of recapturing before the debate but where they now fear they could lose 20 seats.

More House Democrats, and one senator, have come out this week calling on Biden to step aside. Three, led by Connecticut’s Jim Himes, made their announcements after Biden’s press conference, meaning that it did not staunch the bleeding. And we’ve all been reading and hearing this week that privately, the percentage of Hill Democrats who want to see Biden step aside is in the neighborhood of 80 percent.

In Trump world, meanwhile, they’re salivating at the thought of running against this weakened Biden and this divided Democratic Party. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote a much-discussed article this week headlined, “Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win.” The landslide is predicated on one fact: that the opponent is Biden. Alberta: “Biden quitting the race would necessitate a dramatic reset—not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump’s campaign. [Trump aides Susie] Wiles and [Chris] LaCivita told me that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president’s deficiencies; that whether it’s Vice President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom or anyone else, Trump’s blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged. But they know that’s not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way—from the voters they target to the viral memes they create—to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.”

Even assuming that there is some spin there, there is no doubt that Trump himself has spent four years thinking about running against Biden and that the Trump campaign is planning on spending millions to attack Biden on his age and capacities.

Democrats can no longer ignore this. So next week, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and other senior Democrats who are friends of Biden’s (ex-senator Chris Dodd has been mentioned) need to go him and have the talk with him. They need to get him to withdraw.

And, I suppose, to release his delegates to Kamala Harris. I’d rather see an open process. It would be more democratic (for the party that’s supposedly fighting to save democracy). It wouldn’t have to be chaotic. It could be galvanizing. A handful of candidates would step forward. They’d campaign for a month. They’d give convention speeches. The delegates would vote, and the party would have a candidate, who would then have 10 weeks to campaign against Trump. If most voters pay no attention until Labor Day anyway, that’s time enough. The money and logistical questions are serious, but people who really want to figure those things out can do so.

But a Harris scenario seems more likely. Fine. Just choose a scenario, and go to Biden and explain to him the stakes of his staying in the race, for him personally and for his legacy. If he bows out soon, he goes down in history as the guy who saved the country from a second Trump term, had a surprisingly successful term as president, and graciously gave up power like none other than George Washington for the sake of his party and his country.

If he resists that, he risks dragging the Democratic Party into its biggest crisis in a century. A decisive loss that many people anticipated and feared to the hated Trump, with all the authoritarian ramifications thereof, could lead the party into a period of vicious recriminations and weakness. Is that really what Biden wants? We’re about to find out.

Joe Biden had barely opened his mouth last night when I gasped and said to myself, “Oh God, this might be really bad.” His voice was thin and raspy and weak. His words, ostensibly about how badly Donald Trump botched the pandemic, were unfocused and constituted a huge missed opportunity. And that kept happening over and over and over again.

Trump lied like crazy, sure. Nobody’s aborting a fetus after it’s born. “Everyone” did not want Roe overturned. Millions of people from prisons or mental institutions have not crossed the border. Food prices haven’t “quadrupled.” It went on and on—CNN’s fact-checker said he counted at least 30 outright lies. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash never stepped in to fact-check Trump. All that is true. But none of that changes the overwhelming fact. Biden confirmed Democrats’ worst nightmares. “We finally beat Medicare”? Dear God.

CNN’s flash poll had respondents saying Trump won by 67 to 33 percent. Frankly, I’m not sure who those 33 were. The die-hardest of die-hard Democrats, I guess, or maybe single-issue voters who heard Biden say one thing they liked. But 33 percent means a ton of Democrats admitted that their guy lost, and the guy they really hate and rightly consider a direct threat to the country won. And probably half of that 33 were voting with their heart.

What happens now? Let’s talk about the people who have the power to go to Biden and tell him to step aside. What kinds of conversations is Barack Obama having today? Who’s Chuck Schumer talking to? Hakeem Jeffries? Nancy Pelosi? How about Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore? The big donors and bundlers? And perhaps most of all, there’s Jill and his family.

All these people have known for a long time that the Democrats had three options. The first has been sticking with Biden. People knew he was a risky proposition. But until this debate, Biden was, plausibly, the least bad option. Because the other two options are these.

Option two is that Biden steps down and hands it to Kamala Harris. She’s his vice president, and how in the world do you sidestep a sitting vice president?

That’s the most likely non-Biden option, but I know no one who’s excited about it. She’s just not a good politician. What’s the scenario where she beats Trump? Maybe she generates some higher enthusiasm among Black women, and theoretically among younger voters to some extent. Maybe she’d have more success making the race a referendum on abortion.

Harris, though, has a huge weakness. She has never really been able to make a strong economic argument. Even back when people were gushing about her in early 2019, when she announced her presidential candidacy, I noticed she had nothing to say about economic issues. And they’re kind of important in a presidential election. And then, of course, there are the racism and sexism you have to factor in here that would hurt her unfairly. My guess is that she runs three to five points worse than Biden against Trump, and that turns a margin-of-error race into a decisive loss—and one that probably affects control of the House and/or Senate.

The final option, therefore, is to throw the thing open and try to get the nomination to one of the governors, or someone else. This has always had a lot of theoretical appeal, because several of these people look like they’d be good candidates.

But the two perceived problems with this scenario are these. First, how much bad blood would start boiling within the party if Harris were pushed aside? The assumed answer has always been: a lot. If Biden were to step aside, pollsters would start asking questions about Harris, and if those polls showed that Black women will basically bolt, going around Harris could be a nonstarter.

And second, is there really any proof that Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro or Jay Pritzker or anyone else would be a better candidate? Governors sometimes just don’t have it when it comes to running for president. Look at Ron DeSantis.

Those are real problems. But in this break-glass moment, they start to look like smaller problems than staying with Biden or just handing it to Harris.

We’ll see what the post-debate polls say. They’ll start coming out early to mid-next week. My guess is that Biden will lose four points on average, maybe five. It might be a little less. But the coverage of this fiasco over the next two days will only amplify how bad it was.

Politicians fear the unknown. They don’t want to cast votes whose political fallouts they can’t predict. They don’t want their districts redrawn. And they sure don’t want to change a presidential candidate in July.

But this is an undeniable crisis. I don’t know the convention rules. And remember—this is made even more complicated by the fact that Democrats have decided to nominate Biden via Zoom (or whatever) two weeks before the mid-August convention, because they need to have a nominee by early August for the nominee to appear on the ballot in Ohio.

So: Is an abbreviated, multicandidate campaign even possible? Here’s a scenario. Biden drops out next week, releasing the delegates he’s amassed during the primaries to do whatever. Candidates announce—Harris, the governors I named above (along with a few others, like Kentucky’s Andy Beshear), Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, maybe another senator or two. Throughout July, they have an intensive schedule of debates. Six or seven. Over the course of those debates, some will rise, some will fade. In early August, in time for Ohio, let the rank-and-file decide via electronic vote. Make all the contenders commit to supporting the process and standing 100 percent behind the winner.

Weirdly enough, that could actually end up working out pretty well. A new nominee would be fresh, providing a new story and a new start. He or she would trip up Trump. This nominee could arguably then roll into the Chicago convention generating a lot more enthusiasm than Biden will. (That’s another thing—think about the anxiety that will precede his convention speech!)

Then the nominee leaves Chicago with his or her well-chosen running mate, and they spend 10 days barnstorming the swing states so that by the end of the summer, the nominee will have galvanized the party. Then that nominee would have the fall to persuade swing voters, who don’t pay attention until October anyway.

Such a process might reinvigorate a party base that today is feeling pretty dispirited and disgusted and terrified. The conversations that happen this weekend in the high precincts of the Democratic Party will help determine the party’s—and the country’s—fate. It’s risky. Lots of unknown unknowns. But it’s worth remembering that with risk comes reward.

Starting today in her Florida courtroom, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the bench during his waning months in office, is hearing arguments about whether Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel is constitutional. It’s staggering that this is even happening, for a couple reasons.

First, Donald Trump’s legal team is arguing that Attorney General Merrick Garland had no legal authority to hire Smith. This is absurd. Attorneys general—and, sometimes, presidents and the D.C. Circuit Court—have been appointing special counsels since Ulysses Grant tabbed John Henderson to probe the Whiskey Ring. Since the 1970s, The New York Times reports, the courts have routinely rejected such challenges. The Supreme Court upheld the appointment—by Robert Bork, no less—of Leon Jaworski as special prosecutor for Watergate. Other similar challenges have been tossed.

Second, when courts have considered these petitions, they’ve usually done so on the basis of written arguments. To schedule a hearing that will extend over two days is … is what, exactly? A show of fealty to Dear Leader, probably. In addition, Cannon is allowing three lawyers who have filed amicus briefs to make 30-minute oral presentations. As one law professor told the Times: “The fact that Judge Cannon granted the amici request for oral argument seems to suggest that she is seriously considering the constitutional argument against the appointment of the special counsel.”

So, yes. Cannon is entirely capable of ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Lord knows, she has shocked us before. After the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid, she barred prosecutors from using any of the evidence collected there pending a review by a special master. Earlier this year, she issued an order asking both legal teams to submit preliminary jury instructions. The order seemed to embrace a key tenet of the Trump legal defense. There’s a lot more.

Next Monday or Tuesday, the arguments about Smith’s appointment will wrap........

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