Tag: Urging

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York sat in the foyer of President Biden’s Rehoboth Beach house, tired and tense. He had not slept the night before, and on the four-hour drive from Brooklyn to Delaware, he had rehearsed out loud what he planned to say, reviewing notecards as he prepared for what he thought might be the most high-stakes speech he would ever give, to an audience of one.

It was July 13, 2024, a humid summer afternoon just before four o’clock, and Mr. Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate, was about to make a blunt case to Mr. Biden that he needed to drop his bid for a second term.

If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running. Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Mr. Schumer said. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

He would end with a directive. “If I were you,” Mr. Schumer said, “I wouldn’t run, and I’m urging you not to run.”

The roughly 45-minute conversation, which took place on a screened-in porch overlooking a pond, was more pointed and emotional than previously known, and helps to explain how Mr. Biden came to the decision just over a week later to end his campaign.

It is a central piece of the untold story of how Mr. Schumer and congressional Democrats, who spent years batting away suggestions that Mr. Biden was too old and mentally frail to be president, ultimately led the effort to pressure him to step aside. This article is based on interviews with half a dozen people who participated in that private push, and who recounted their parts in it on the condition of anonymity for a forthcoming book, “Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man With Rats in His Walls Broke Congress.”

When Mr. Schumer arrived at Mr. Biden’s beach house that summer day, he could hear the president shouting.

Mr. Biden was finishing up a contentious Zoom call with a small group of lawmakers who were expressing their concerns about his viability as a candidate, and his back was up. This was exactly the kind of scenario Mr. Schumer had been hoping to avoid for the past three weeks, as he stalled for time and dragged his feet about having this awkward conversation at all. He worried that the famously stubborn president would feel cornered and dig in even more.

For months, Mr. Schumer had been concerned that Mr. Biden was going to lose to Mr. Trump and cost Democrats Congress. It wasn’t that he thought Mr. Biden was not capable of the job. During their weekly conversations, the president often rambled, but he had always rambled. Once in a while, Mr. Biden would forget why he had called, but Mr. Schumer thought little of it. He was convinced that Mr. Biden could handle the job.

But with the Republican messaging machine deriding him relentlessly as old and senile, Democrats were hard pressed to land any attacks on Mr. Trump. Long before the president’s disastrous debate performance, Mr. Schumer had privately concluded that the barrier of Mr. Biden’s age was too much for him to overcome.

Still, the Senate majority leader felt he was in a box. If he tried to convene a group to discuss other candidates, made calls or expressed his discontent in any semiprivate way, it might leak out, only weakening the president more. Not to mention how deeply unpleasant it was to offer unsolicited advice to the commander in chief about his political future. Instead Mr. Schumer, like every other Democrat in a position of power, had chosen to do nothing.

So when Mr. Biden bombed during his June 27 debate with Mr. Trump, Mr. Schumer regarded it as something of a gift, a forcing mechanism to start an overdue discussion about the president’s political viability.

That night, about two dozen House Democrats, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, gathered for a watch party in the community room of the Washington waterfront luxury apartment complex where Mr. Jeffries and many of them lived, known as “the dorm.” But the festive atmosphere dissipated immediately after Mr. Biden, pale and hoarse, shuffled onto the stage in Atlanta and began stumbling through his answers. By the end of the 90-minute debate, those who had been able to bear sticking around were in a panic.

Mr. Jeffries had a motto he often shared with his caucus: “Calm is an intentional decision.” He tried to channel it that night, even as his internal alarm bells were ringing and colleagues were telling him they could not possibly win their seats with Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket.

“We’ve got to process it all, see where we’re at tomorrow morning, and we’ll come up with a game plan,” Mr. Jeffries told them.

Mr. Schumer, who was at a fund-raiser in California during the debate, had a similar message for the donors he saw that night. “We’ll have to see,” he told them vaguely.

But many powerful people had seen enough.

That night, Mr. Schumer’s flip phone started ringing, and it wouldn’t stop for days. Donors, members of Congress, union bosses and even strangers who fished his number out of a Harvard reunion book were calling, pleading with him to tell Mr. Biden to get out of the race.

Mr. Schumer had one simple message for everyone who called him. “Do not be public,” he said. “That will get his back up, and you’ve got to let the dust settle. But if you can, call whoever you know in the campaign. Call the White House.”

Some lawmakers thought waiting was the wrong strategy.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, chose at first to go the private route, sending a letter to Mr. Biden on July 6 encouraging him to leave the race. One of Mr. Biden’s top advisers, Steve Ricchetti, assured Mr. Raskin that the president and the first lady had both read his letter and that Mr. Biden planned to call him. But the president never did. So he released his letter publicly.

“I did expect to hear from him,” Mr. Raskin said later.

Mr. Schumer saved his frank conversations for Mr. Jeffries and former President Barack Obama. On June 28, the night after the debate, Mr. Jeffries was scheduled to participate in a fund-raiser in New York City, where he was to interview Mr. Obama in front of an audience in a “fireside chat” setting. At a brief dinner meeting before the event, Mr. Obama suggested addressing the elephant in the room “right up at the top.”

Onstage, the former president told the crowd that bad debates happen and while this one had greatly complicated the situation, Democrats had to find a way to power through it. They took no questions.

Privately, Mr. Jeffries began working to persuade Mr. Ricchetti and Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff, that Vice President Kamala Harris would be a superior candidate to Mr. Biden.

“We don’t have data at this moment,” Mr. Jeffries said. “But the most powerful narrative in American politics is change. Vice President Harris would represent change.”

Mr. Ricchetti assured Mr. Jeffries that he was reporting everything he was saying to Mr. Biden. But he also rejected the Democratic leader’s assessment.

“We can get through it,” Mr. Ricchetti said. “We think our allies on the Hill are wrong.”

On July 3, Mr. Schumer spoke with Mr. Biden and pressed him to do more to counter the narrative that he was not up to continuing in the race. But he stopped short of telling him to drop out.

“Mr. President,” Mr. Schumer said then, “the only way you’re going to save this is to show up day in and day out, with unscripted town halls. And people will be able to smell if it’s spontaneous, and it will show that this was a one-off.”

Mr. Ricchetti assured Mr. Schumer that the president would put doubters at ease when he participated in a news conference after a NATO summit in Washington the next week. But the majority leader was not at ease.

“That’s not even close to good enough,” he fumed.

Still, Mr. Schumer held back Democratic senators who wanted to publicly call on Mr. Biden to step aside, even though he didn’t disagree with their assessment. “It’ll just make it worse,” he told them, “and we’re not ready.”

As days ticked by, Mr. Obama worried that Democrats were doing nothing. He told Mr. Schumer that he himself had a fragile relationship with his former vice president, who still carried a chip on his shoulder over Mr. Obama’s decision to support Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. Having urged him not to run back then, Mr. Obama told Mr. Schumer, he wasn’t sure if he was the best messenger to tell Mr. Biden to step aside now.

“You may be a better one,” Mr. Obama said.

Still, Mr. Schumer hesitated.

Then Mr. Biden dug in. On July 8, as members of Congress returned to Washington after their Independence Day break, they received a defiant letter from the president saying he was staying in the race and expected them to fall in line with his decision.

“The question of how to move forward has been well aired for over a week now,” he wrote. “And it’s time for it to end.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill seethed. In a closed-door lunch the next day, senators said the president was being selfish. They questioned whether he had even written the letter himself, or whether his aides or maybe even his son Hunter had written it for him.

On the phone the next day, Mr. Schumer told Mr. Ricchetti he needed to send the top White House and campaign advisers to address the Democratic caucus, and threatened him should he fail to do so.

“If we don’t have this meeting, I cannot hold my members back anymore,” Mr. Schumer said. “You’re going to get half my caucus to sign a letter saying he should step down.”

The July 11 meeting was grim. Democratic senators, even normally reserved ones who were close with Mr. Biden, erupted. The usually quiet Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate and former paratrooper, said he could no longer support his commander in chief unless Mr. Biden could produce two neurologists to issue a public report saying he was fit to serve, and then hold a news conference where anyone could ask questions.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told Mr. Biden’s aides that the silence from the majority of Democratic senators should not be interpreted as a sign of support. It was out of respect and affection to allow Mr. Biden time to gracefully exit the race, but it would not last forever, he said, because if they continued to vouch for his fitness, they would be “lying.”

Among the only people in the room who spoke up to defend Mr. Biden was Senator John Fetterman, a first-term Democrat from Pennsylvania. “We’ve got to be for Joe Biden,” he said, addressing his colleagues. “You have no spine.”

After the meeting, Mr. Schumer pulled him aside for a rare scolding. “You can always express what you think in our caucus, but don’t ever tell our members they have no spine,” he said. “It’s not effective for you and not fair to them.”

The Biden palace guard left that day seemingly cowed by what it had heard. But the president remained publicly and privately dug in.

The next day in a more than hourlong, one-on-one meeting with the president, Mr. Jeffries laid out similarly grave concerns among House Democrats. His plan was to use the word “irretrievable” to describe the party’s chances of winning the House if Mr. Biden continued his re-election campaign.

Late the next afternoon, Mr. Schumer joined Mr. Biden on the screened-in porch in Rehoboth Beach to deliver his own blunt message.

He gave a detailed blow-by-blow of what each Democratic senator had told Mr. Biden’s top aides on Capitol Hill days earlier, leaving the president wide-eyed and leading Mr. Schumer to conclude that his aides had not briefed him on what had transpired.

“If there’s a secret ballot, Mr. President,” Mr. Schumer said, “my guess is you at most get five yeses.”

“Really?” Mr. Biden responded.

“I know my caucus,” Mr. Schumer told him. “You know I know my caucus.”

Mr. Biden nodded.

Then Mr. Schumer delivered the speech he had been rehearsing. Some people go into politics for money and power, he said, but some do it to leave a legacy.

“You’re certainly one of those,” he told Mr. Biden, adding that he hoped he was too. He ticked through an impressive list of the policies they had enacted together, including the assault weapons ban and other gun control measures, the Violence Against Women Act and Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda during the first two years of his presidency.

“If I had to leave politics tomorrow for whatever reason, I would say to myself, ‘All the shit we take in this job was worth it for making the world a better place,’” Mr. Schumer said. “And your legacy is 20 times mine.”

Then as the president listened silently, Mr. Schumer told him he risked going down in history as one of the “darkest figures.”

Mr. Schumer said if he had even a 50 percent chance of winning, he would probably keep going. “Fifty-fifty, to do this, to stay here; it’s worth it,” he said. “But, Mr. President, you’re not getting the information as to what the chances are.”

When he asked whether Mr. Biden had talked to his pollsters about his chances of winning the race, the president shook his head.

“Well, I have talked to them,” Mr. Schumer said. “My guess is you have about a 5 percent chance. None of your pollsters disagree with me.”

Only twice did Mr. Biden interrupt to ask a question, and both times it was: “Do you really think Kamala can win?”

Mr. Schumer said that he didn’t know, but that she had a far better chance than Mr. Biden did. (Mr. Biden has since made it clear that he disagrees. In an interview with USA Today, the president said of whether he could have defeated Mr. Trump: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.”)

And on Friday, a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, said that “the president was fully briefed on campaign polling and fully briefed on his pollsters’ assessments. Internal and public numbers showed a competitive race.”

At the time, Mr. Biden revealed little of his own thinking, but he did not argue, and he did not shout.

“I need a week,” was all he said.

As he ushered Mr. Schumer into a small elevator to exit the house, the president put two hands on the senator’s shoulders and offered a quintessentially Bidenesque bit of hyperbole.

“You’ve got bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” he said.

The two embraced as Mr. Schumer headed back to his car, where he broke down in tears as he recounted the meeting to his aides. He didn’t know what Mr. Biden would end up doing, he told them, but he felt he had gotten through to him.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.