Top Republicans call on Biden to resign from office as well

The News

On Sunday afternoon, President Joe Biden announced, after weeks of pressure from his party, that he would be dropping out of the presidential race. For Republicans, that’s not enough: They want him to resign from the presidency, too.

“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted. “He must resign the office immediately.”

Trump campaign manager’s Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles echoed the call in a statement calling Biden “a national security threat in great cognitive decline.”

“Joe Biden cannot take himself out of a campaign for President because he is too mentally incompetent and still remain in the White House,” the two wrote.

It’s quickly become a widespread call among Republicans, with the argument being that if Biden is incapable of running for re-election, he’s also not fit to continue serving as president.

Steve Daines, chairman of the NRSC, argued that if Biden “is no longer capable of running for re-election, he is no longer capable of serving as President.” Sen. Rick Scott, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Elise Stefanik, Tommy Tuberville, Jim Banks, and others echoed the messaging.

There were some exceptions. Rep. Mike Lawler, running in a swing seat in New York, stopped short of a call to resign. And Sen. Mitt Romney, a longtime Trump critic, praised Biden’s decision while thanking him for his work on bipartisan initiatives together.

“Others will judge his presidency,” Romney said. “However, having worked with him these past few years, I respect President Biden. His decision to withdraw from the race was right and is in the best interest of the country.”

Sen. Joe Manchin, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said on Sunday that he had “all the confidence in the world” in Biden’s ability to remain president during a CBS News interview in which he also called on Biden to drop out of the race. He argued Biden would be able to devote his full focus to the job, rather than have his attention divided by campaigning.

Shelby’s view

This argument has been quietly brewing within the Republican Party for weeks — at last week’s RNC Convention, I heard countless discussions about the Biden debacle, and whether he was fit to keep serving. The consensus was always the same: If he dropped out, it was an indication that he wasn’t capable of continuing for even six more months and Democrats should be forced to make the case otherwise.

To be clear, team Trump started off this drama with the belief that Biden wouldn’t step down. And, in many ways, they didn’t want him to, seeing a politically wounded, elderly candidate whose own party had lost faith in him as an easy opponent to defeat.

But, as the reality that Biden might actually step down soaked in, the Trump campaign decided to take it in stride. They trolled Democrats with quotes about an attempted “coup” by party leaders — a not-so-subtle riff on the criticisms Trump received for trying to overturn the 2020 election — while boasting that Kamala Harris would be even easier to defeat.

After Biden made his announcement, the Trump campaign worked quickly to tie Harris to Biden. It was a continuation of the messaging they’d been floating over the past week — at the RNC Convention, for example, LaCivita pointed out how they’d attack her as “the border tsar” who was tasked with presiding over immigration.

“Kamala Harris is just as much of a joke as Biden is. Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden,” he wrote, alongside Wiles, on Sunday.

Notable

• Some Democrats are in favor of a competitive primary process to replace Biden on the ticket, and a document circulated over the weekend detailed possible options, Semafor reported.