Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of Delaware, N.Y., had just finished semi-secret talks with President Biden in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, late Saturday afternoon.
A surprising number of House and Senate Democrats were growing nervous about Biden being the Democratic nominee this fall. What no one knew was that Schumer had traveled to Rehoboth to meet with the president and have a frank discussion about how Democratic senators feel about him continuing in the race. The number of Democrats who want him out appears to have grown after Biden aides met with Democratic senators on Capitol Hill on Thursday afternoon.
Why Democratic concerns about Biden calmed for a few days
Schumer’s meeting with Biden wasn’t a total surprise, after all, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) met with the president on Thursday night, and both men served as emissaries from their respective caucuses conveying messages of concern from rank-and-file members about Biden’s campaign.
The announcement that Schumer had met with the president hit reporters’ inboxes at 6:05 p.m. ET on Saturday.
The message didn’t provide any details or specifics, but it didn’t need to: the mere fact that Schumer was there to deliver a message from his Democratic colleagues to the President of the United States spoke volumes.
“I met with President Biden this afternoon in Delaware and we had a great conversation,” Schumer said in a statement.
Such news would have shaken the political landscape.
A side-by-side photo of U.S. President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. (Getty Images)
But that’s not the case this Saturday night.
Just five minutes after Schumer’s statement, at 6:11 p.m., a gunman attempted to assassinate former President Trump.
Conversations about President Biden and divisions within the Democratic Party will have to wait.
The shooting bought Biden time. Let’s not forget that the debate where the president’s performance shook the Democrats was on June 27. The shooting allowed President Biden to maintain control and waste time.
The political world was abuzz on Saturday, watching to see whether more Democrats would call for President Biden to step down. Biden held two conference calls on Saturday afternoon, one with the House Progressive Caucus and another with the House “New Democrat” coalition. At that point, 19 Democrats had called on the president to withdraw from his reelection effort, 13 of them New Democrats. Fox reported that the call did little to boost the confidence of anxious lawmakers. One source predicted that the number of Democrats calling for the president to withdraw from the race may have surged to 50 later that night or Sunday morning.
Congressional Bypass: Biden Issue Leaves Many Democrats Equivocal
As I have written in this column before, the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan argued that “events” are the most important factor in politics.
A major political event occurred over the weekend that quickly thwarted any attempt by Democrats to remove the president from the race.
The inertia that had been building for weeks to sideline Biden suddenly froze.
And it helped keep Biden in office.
“The president is rooting for us,” one House Democratic leader told Fox about the president. “You can’t have this circular firing squad.”
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump is hastily carried off the stage during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said former U.S. President Donald Trump killed one spectator and wounded another before the gunman died. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Indeed, while the “incident” of the Trump shooting has highlighted recent rifts within the party over Biden, it has actually strengthened Republican unity.
A senior House Democratic leader told Fox News that “unity” had been Democrats’ selling point in recent years, but the party’s poor performance in last month’s presidential debate called that unity into question.
“That armor has been exposed,” one House Democratic leader said, “and now Republicans are using that unity against us.”
That’s why Democrats are panicking again.
Fox said Democrats are reportedly aware that former President Trump’s survival and the iconic photo of him after the shooting have boosted his support among voters. Democrats were already unlikely to win after the debate. Now they’re even more nervous, especially when it comes to House and Senate races in battleground districts and states.
Trump assassination attempt: ‘Utter chaos’ is a classic newsroom tale
So the debate over Biden’s political viability as president is heating up again, sparked by a letter from some Democratic senators calling on the Democratic National Committee to postpone the virtual roll call on August 7. Schumer and Jeffries also spoke out, urging the DNC to postpone the nomination.
It’s good for Democrats that the Republican Convention in Milwaukee is taking place in a week, obscuring the Democratic Party’s turmoil. Most of the news is dominated by the investigation into the shooting and the introduction of Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as former President Trump’s running mate. Even the debate over Project 2025 is good cover for Democrats for now, as the divisions within the party are real. And the party is not as far along in removing President Biden as a candidate as it was a few weeks ago.
This “event,” as Harold Macmillan put it, temporarily silenced the public calls for the president’s removal from office, but that was all it did: it stifled those debates, but it never really assuaged Democratic fears.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle holds a press conference in Chicago on June 4. (Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)
Some of this cover-up may continue after Democrats return to Congress next week, as all eyes will be on the hearing with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle scheduled for Monday before the House Oversight Committee, not to mention the hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee scheduled for Tuesday, and a hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray scheduled for Wednesday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, will likely create a bipartisan task force to investigate the assassination attempt, and as other details trickle in, there will likely be a range of reactions from lawmakers, keeping in mind that this will be the first time Congress has returned to Washington since the shooting.
Don’t forget that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be addressing a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, and that controversy is sure to garner no attention.
Perhaps all the other “events” will work in favor of Democrats who want to remove President Biden from the running. Such a maneuver would be awkward at best. All the other events may overshadow such extraordinary political maneuvering.
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But that doesn’t mean such efforts aren’t happening behind the scenes, and all of this will likely return to the headlines at some point because it involves a sitting U.S. president.
And that will be an event in itself.
