Why on God’s Green Earth Would Biden Tweet This Now?

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“I’m sick” —Joe Biden, on social media, about an hour after publicly reporting he had COVID-19.

It’s been a challenging time for President Biden. Many of the top-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate have privately told him to abandon his campaign for a second term. The DNC has delayed its roll call vote to nominate Biden, ostensibly on these top Democrats’ urging. The polls are really bleak; just yesterday, the Associated Press released the results of a poll conducted with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that found nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to leave the race. Back against the ropes, Biden conceded in a recent interview that he would consider leaving the race if a doctor told him directly that he had to for medical reasons.

And then he got COVID.

It seemed almost cosmically fitting. Sure, the universe seemed to be saying, he’s already facing disastrous polling, mutinous staffers, defecting allies, and the defanging of his attack ads due to his rival’s near-martyrdom from an unsuccessful assassination attempt (plus the memorable resulting photos). Why not tack on COVID?

The White House says Biden’s symptoms are minor. It could have been a providential opportunity for Biden to take stock of his situation and do some serious reflection. So why, then, did his campaign’s social media team respond by … trolling?

Here, at 7:22 p.m.:

Two minutes later came the punchline:

Let’s take a moment to appreciate how strange this all is. This was an establishment figure, rejecting his own peers’ pleas to change course, affecting the kind of strangely flippant and even combative tone you might expect from an internet native (which he is not), in the midst of an existential fight not just over his own political survival but that of the entire Democratic Party. It’s definitely kind of funny! But it was not received well. (Axios reported on Thursday that some Democrats were “infuriated” by the tweet. “They need to read the room,” one said of the Biden camp.)

And it felt all the more depressingly off-key from the story’s developments in the time between news of the COVID test breaking and the posting of the joke (which was replicated, in a subject-line-to-body-text format, in the campaign’s fundraising emails).

Around 6:30 p.m., Semafor reported that one of Biden’s counselors, the Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, had told him in person earlier in the day that donors were bailing on him. Ten minutes before Biden posted the tweet, ABC News reported that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had tried to convince Biden to drop out in a private conversation. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, ABC reported, was on the same page.

So by the time of the tweet, Biden’s embattled stance had become a lot more public. The jokey, troll-ish post left Democrats wondering: Does his campaign really not understand how bad things are?

By 8 p.m. Wednesday, CNN was reporting that Biden was more “receptive” to the idea of stepping down. The New York Times would soon follow. And toward the end of the night, CNN reported that Nancy Pelosi had privately told Biden that he was putting Democrats’ control of the House in danger. Top Democrats were leaking their concerns to apply even more pressure.

In recent weeks, Biden seems to have been attempting a pivot, hitting more populist messaging and coming out swinging on the Supreme Court. This latest tweet fit with a Dark Brandon gonzo-internet ethos that his campaign has tried to co-opt. But on Thursday, when it was reported that even former President Barack Obama was expressing doubts, it all seemed to be, almost tragically, too little too late.