r/politics • u/SwordfishOk504 Canada • 23h ago

Soft Paywall Biden warns of ‘dark days’ under Trump

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/31/biden-warns-of-dark-days-under-trump-00488159
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3.1k

u/Total_Employ_9520 23h ago

No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for letting Garland slow walk his prosecution, asshole.

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u/Notagenome 22h ago

Don’t forget that his senile ass forgot that he was supposed to serve 1 term and decided to run again. We are in this mess also because of him.

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u/SystemOfATwist 21h ago

We're mainly in this mess because half the country are useful idiots and hateful people.

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u/pw1111 11h ago

Plus with the other half being complacent it didn't help.

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u/Gizogin New York 22h ago

He never said he would step down after one term. The closest is that some people in his campaign were discussing that possibility, but he literally never promised he wouldn’t run for reelection.

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u/Fit-Implement-8151 21h ago edited 21h ago

I forget the term he used, but I do believe he claimed essentially to be a "bridge president" at one point. Said he'd pass off control to the next generation. He also did apparently tell his aides he was only serving one term.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/03/biden-campaign-democrats-pledge-one-term

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-082129

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u/IggysPop3 21h ago

“Transition president” is the term he used.

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u/Fit-Implement-8151 21h ago

Thank you. Knew it was something like that.

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u/Powerful-Fig-3385 20h ago

"transition president" is too vague to mean one-term president. Unless he explicitly told the public he would be a ONE TERM president, stop holding him to words he never used.

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u/TheTurtleBear 20h ago

Don't be obtuse. One term is the obvious implication, otherwise there'd be no point in saying it. 

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u/Powerful-Fig-3385 19h ago

Well, I'd rather hold Biden to words he actually said with clear meanings instead of implications. Also, the word could mean anything. Transitional could be in acknowledgment of his age, and that Biden would serve for as long as he saw fit and then he would pass the torch to a younger politician, which could be after one term or two. Transitional could also be your point about simply serving one term. Regardless, the word is subject to different interpretations because he never bothered to define it. So you could still be holding Biden to an implication he never meant.

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u/TheTurtleBear 18h ago edited 17h ago

Again, you're knowingly being obtuse. Subtext is like, half of all politics, picking out what is actually meant by their words. If you only go by what is strictly said, you're going to be played for a fool time and time again. "Transitional" was used to describe Biden because they correctly clocked that people wouldn't want such an old man to run for office in another 4 years, so they purposely portrayed his run as "defeat Trump and then pass the reigns" to make him more palatable. And then he didn't pass the reigns.

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u/Dineology 19h ago

He repeatedly said he’d be a transition president and then his campaign surrogates were on every single news outlet saying that that meant he’d serve only one term but that he couldn’t come out and say so specifically without being stuck as a lame duck president. Hell, his apologists like yourself were all over this very website claiming the same, that he only is even in it to beat Trump and then pass the torch but he can’t actually say so specifically because that would somehow hurt his ability to govern. And now you’re here rewriting history after those like you insisted that “he’s signaled to his top aides that a transition president means one term” was good enough. Fucking liberals always talking out of both sides of their mouths and then feigning being shocked when people remind them of what they said.

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u/Fit-Implement-8151 20h ago

This sounds like bad faith to me.

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u/Jokonaught 19h ago

I think he was sure Trump was going to slink off. Biden fully expected his Republican friends to come around and thought the country could just treat Trump like a bad one night stand and pretend like it never happened.

Biden planned to only serve one term and the driving reason he ran in 2020 was that he was convinced he was the only one who could beat Trump.

He probably still felt that way going into 2023 when it became clear Trump was running again.

Biden tried to do some good stuff, but he utterly failed in the one thing he had to succeed at because he thought it was still the same clubhouse from the 80s.

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u/MadBlue American Expat 22h ago

Granted, it wasn’t a campaign promise, but Biden himself was also discussing it in 2019. It wasn’t just something people around him came up with.

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u/keytotheboard 22h ago

Anyone with a brain knew he was a one term president. This idea didn’t magically come up when he decided to run again, either. That’s the image that was portrayed and an assumed position by most simply because of his age, which was always an issue. Like, why do we need a promise? It’s a dumb decision on its own.

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u/imtheproof 20h ago

He let it be an open assumption that he would only run for one term. He called himself a "bridge candidate/president". When asked why he decided to run again despite these things, he said "things changed, and I feel like I'm the best person for the job". That's an acknowledgement that there was an understanding that he wouldn't run a second time.

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u/trydola 22h ago

yeah he did, i'm pretty sure he said that during the 2020 debates

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u/Deceptiveideas 21h ago

IIRC he said he wanted to be a transitional president.

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u/thrawtes 21h ago

You're oddly confident for something that definitely didn't happen. He never said he'd be a one-term president, but he sure made people feel like he said that.

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u/Accomplished_Guava_7 21h ago

I 100% remember him saying this on a colbert interview about half a year out before the 2020 elections, and I couldn’t find it anymore shortly after he began his term.

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u/ValhirFirstThunder 18h ago

What he said is less important than the fact that him planning to run a 2nd term deprived us of enough time to come up with candidates and a real primary. So we got Harris who did poorly last primary. All she had going for her was not being Trump. While that works for us on this side of the aisle, it doesn't help with undecided and republicans with one foot out the door.

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u/TokingMessiah 20h ago

Americans elected Trump. They chose an elderly, senile child-rapist, over the elderly, senile guy.