On Saturday, Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, argued that if Biden drops out of the presidential race, he should also resign from the presidency.
“Everyone calling on Joe Biden to *stop running* without also calling on him to resign the presidency is engaged in an absurd level of cynicism,” he said in a post on X/Twitter. “If you can’t run, you can’t serve.”
He added, “He should resign now.”
This is hardly the first time that this argument has been made.
“The question is, if he’s not going to be their nominee because he’s not up to it, how can he be our president for the next six months?” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) said Thursday. “If there’s something wrong with you that doesn’t allow you to run for president, how can you still be there as president? If they’re going to remove him as nominee, they’ve got to remove him as president, and that’s really bad for our country.”
For some reason, Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, took issue with this claim.
This, of course, is an absurd argument. No one is saying that Biden shouldn’t run because of a physical limitation, like a broken hip or a medical condition that would otherwise not impact his ability to serve.
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At the crux of the debate over whether Biden should drop out of the election is his mental fitness—something that absolutely impacts his ability to serve.
Goldberg’s reasoning was promptly mocked by conservatives.
It’s hard to understand why Jonah Goldberg would make such an intellectually dishonest argument. He must know that if Biden drops out but stays on as president, the question of his mental fitness for the presidency will not only plague him for the remainder of his term, but it will hang like a dark cloud over the Democratic Party, which willing participated in covering up his mental decline for years.
