Republicans Keep Saying Biden Is Unfit to Serve and Must Resign Immediately. About That.

Republicans did not fall out of a coconut tree, and they had their talking points ready by the time Joe Biden left the presidential race on Sunday.

The first widespread argument they made was that Democrats had done dishonor to the very name of their party by overruling the will of Democratic primary voters. As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, replacing Biden would “upend the expressed will of the American people in primary elections across the country.” His counterpart on the other end of the Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson, tweeted that Democrats had “invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite.”

The concern for Democratic primary voters is touching and surely heartfelt. In recent memory, it’s reminiscent of the work Donald Trump and fellow Republicans devoted to protecting the rights of Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 and 2020 by echoing calls that the Democratic establishment had “rigged” primaries against him. This is more adorable than anything—a whole lot of those 14 million primary voters, who had no other meaningful primary choices, also had new opinions about Biden’s candidacy after the June debate—but it’s also a pretty straightforward political tactic of trying to encourage division in the opposite political party. Happy hunting to them.

It’s the other talking point, though, that doesn’t really track. And that point is: If Biden is too old to run, he’s too old to serve, and so he must resign.

Republicans are running this line roughshod.

“If Joe Biden ends his reelection campaign, how can he justify remaining President?” Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance tweeted. “Not running for reelection would be a clear admission that President Trump was right all along about Biden not being mentally fit enough to serve as Commander-in-Chief. There is no middle ground.”

Johnson could not have agreed more. “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” he wrote. “He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.” Another member of the House GOP leadership team, Rep. Elise Stefanik, was similarly distressed. “If Joe Biden can’t run for re-election, he is unable and unfit to serve as President of the United States. He must immediately resign.”

Then, of course, there was the Republican nominee, sharing his own remix on Truth Social.

“Who is running our Country right now?” Trump posted. “It’s not Crooked Joe, he has no idea where he is. If he can’t run for office, he can’t run our Country!!!”

I get it. Republicans felt they had a good thing going with Biden’s candidacy and thought they would take the White House with little resistance. Now, even though Kamala Harris is a mightily flawed candidate herself, Republicans will need to put some work into it. They haven’t accepted that and would prefer to keep banging on Biden. It’s been only a day.

But If he’s too old to run, he’s too old to serve doesn’t make sense.

Biden’s being too old to successfully run for another four years doesn’t mean that he can’t serve another six months. While he struggled to get the Democrats’ message across, it did not seem—if you watched his press conference at the end of a successful NATO gathering earlier this month—that he had lost track of reality, and he appeared especially in command of foreign policy. Would that still be the case somewhere between ages 82 and 86? That was a question the American people doubted, while they were less doubtful about his prospects for the remainder of his term.

Not all Republicans are using this line upon the president’s retirement announcement. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney issued a statement that read a lot like that of a normal human being, saying that he had “respect” for Biden and that “his decision to withdraw from the race was right and is in the best interest of the country,” before offering Biden his best wishes. Former Vice President Mike Pence, similarly, said: “President Joe Biden made the right decision for our country and I thank him for putting the interests of our Nation ahead of his own.”

Those two, though, are among the (dwindling) number of high-profile Republicans who still haven’t come around to Trump. However, one enthusiastically pro-Trump Republican—Texas Rep. Pete Sessions—was on the same page.

“I would hope that he would stay in office,” Sessions told the BBC of Biden. “I would hope that he would complete this term—and I think the country does.” When told that Johnson disagreed, Sessions said, “Mike Johnson does not know what he’s talking about.”

Maybe Johnson does, though, and he’s the only one for whom the talking point makes clear sense. If Biden resigned and Harris assumed the presidency, Johnson would be next in the line of succession for the big seat.