BREAKING: New York Times Editorial Board calls for President Joe Biden to drop out of presidential race

After a shockingly bad debate performance, the Editorial Board of The New York Times has called on President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. The Times begins by reiterating what Biden himself has said, which is that the at stake in the coming election is the future of democracy itself. Democrats have repeatedly said that democracy is on the ballot.

After taking aim at former president and top contender Donald Trump, the Times writes "Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance of taking on this threat of tyranny and defeating it. His argument rests largely on the fact that he beat Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year."

They cite the Thursday night debate, where Biden fumbled, appeared confused, and at one point made so little sense that Trump said "I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence; I don’t think he knows what he said either."

The Times said that Biden needed to perform well at the debate in order to "convince the American public that he was equal to the formidable demands of the office he is seeking to hold for another term. Voters, however, cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago."

The storied New York outlet has long been a supporter of the president and has had nothing kind to say about Trump or his administration. They have held up the Capitol riot of January 6 as basically the worst thing of all time, an event that the American people should lament to no end, rending their garments and the judicial system in a desperate attempt to expunge it. It was only a few short years ago, in the summer of 2020, that the outlet blew up its own opinion page over an op ed from Senator Tom Cotton calling for the National Guard to quell the seemingly endless days of rioting over George Floyd during the dog days of the pandemic. Now, they are calling for the Democrat president to step aside, saying that he appeared as a "shadow" of himself and "struggled" to state his plan or to respond to his opponent.

They praise him, with something more akin to a eulogy than a column, before saying "the greatest service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election."

And what is their solution? They say for sure they'd rather a dementia-addled Biden to Trump, because "that is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses," but that "given that very danger, the stakes for the country and uneven abilities of Mr. Biden, the United States needs a stronger opponent" that Biden.

"Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader," the Times insists. 

"The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November," the say, before concluding that "It is the best chance to protect the soul of the nation — the cause that drew Mr. Biden to run for the presidency in 2019 — from the malign warping of Mr. Trump."

Following the debate, it was widely reported that as Biden's performance became a bigger and bigger flop, Democratic operatives, pundits, and officials were frantically messaging each other to finally acknowledge—and find a solution—to the obvious Biden problem. While reporters were not allowed in the debate hall, which housed only the CNN production team, moderators, and the two presidents, journalists interacted with surrogates for both campaigns in the adjacent Spin Room. Trump surrogates included a few men who are reportedly on the VP short list, and California Governor Gavin Newsom was on hand to speak for and endorse Biden.