How the bet on an 81-year-old Joe Biden turned into an epic miscalculation

President Biden had just finished trying to persuade a group of congressional Democrats to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill when Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, took the microphone.

In 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers, according to Democrats in the room. After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say, one lawmaker said.

“It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” recalled Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), who would go on to mount an unsuccessful primary challenge against the president.

That was October 2021. That month was the last time Biden met with the House Democratic caucus on the Hill regarding legislation.

Nearly three years later, concerns about the 81-year-old president’s age and mental acuity have put an abrupt cap on his half-century political career. They had grown from a murmur among allies, who said they believed—or hoped—they were catching the president on a bad day, to a deafening roar, as many of those same allies called on him to step aside in the wake of his disastrous June 27 debate performance.

On Sunday, Biden announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race, an unparalleled step that leaves Democrats without a nominee less than four months before Election Day. Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place, but it remains to be seen if the rest of the party will rally behind her.

How the Democratic Party came to the brink of nominating a candidate with an obvious flaw is a story of allies eager to look the other way, Biden advisers who worked to stamp out doubts about his vigor and a party apparatus that boxed out alternative candidates.

The result is an epic, yearslong miscalculation that has Democrats racing to mount an uncertain reboot of their campaign against former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee who is fresh off a unifying party convention that was galvanized by an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate him on July 13.

The drawbacks of Biden’s age were clear to voters, with polls showing that nearly three-quarters of them last year deemed him too old to seek another term. Yet inside the party’s uppermost ranks, revelations about the toll aging has taken on the president seemed to catch many people by surprise in recent months.

“I am really concerned about what we were not told during these months,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) in an interview. “I remain concerned about that—that for whatever reasons, this overprotective, stage-managed kind of operation not only appears to have denied the American people broadly of an understanding of the president’s current situation, but also other elected officials.”

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said on Sunday, “President Biden has given over 50 interviews this year alone, recently held a one-hour, thorough press conference, done over 580 gaggles with the White House press corps in office, and travels the country speaking directly to the American people about his agenda for making their lives better.” He said Biden has built the most successful record in modern American history, and that the president “has always said that it is fair for reporters to ask about his age.”

Ron Klain, who attended the October 2021 meeting and was Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said the decision not to call for a vote at the time was a “brilliant” move by Biden that avoided strong-arming reluctant members of the Democratic caucus and that later paid dividends. Biden signed the infrastructure bill into law the next month, one of his biggest legislative achievements. Other Democrats in the room also said they were confused by how Biden handled the meeting.

This account is based on interviews with more than four dozen current and former administration officials, campaign aides, donors, lawmakers, congressional aides and foreign diplomats.

Limited contact

Many Democratic lawmakers said they were stunned by Biden’s condition in the debate in part because their contact with him has been so limited over the past three years. “We would see him on TV or at a signing ceremony, even something like the White House picnic this year—you begin to think, well maybe he’s a little bit off, but not enough to take much notice,” Doggett said.

Senior officials at cabinet agencies have privately complained for years that they didn’t have enough contact with the president and his senior team, who centralized power in the White House and directed much of the administration’s policy activity.

While it’s not unusual for cabinet members to want more access to the president than they get, some officials described Biden as unusually removed from the rest of his administration—or, as one former administration official put it, not engaged in the “hands-on business of governing.” Some cabinet secretaries see the president as infrequently as once a month.

Chris Lu, former White House cabinet secretary under former President Barack Obama, said in a statement provided by the White House that a monthly pace of meetings between the president and cabinet secretaries isn’t uncommon and that the cabinet typically interacts the most with senior White House staff.

For months before the debate, Biden’s advisers responded angrily to suggestions that Biden was deteriorating, telling critics in private conversations that their concerns were overblown and were playing into Republican critiques.

Trump, they pointed out, had plenty of mix-ups himself. The 78-year-old had boasted about polling showing him leading Obama, who isn’t running for office, had warned that the nation was on the brink of World War II and had otherwise behaved erratically during and after his presidency.

Several of Biden’s senior aides told people who expressed doubts that the president remained sharp behind the scenes and wasn’t showing signs of slipping.

That was the case when The Wall Street Journal interviewed senior White House aides and Democratic lawmakers this spring and asked whether the president’s acuity had declined. “I met with the president every day for two years and I still see him regularly, and I can tell you he is sharp and has good recall of events and facts and information,” Klain, the former chief of staff, told the Journal in April.

Bates, the White House spokesman, pointed to the president’s news conference this month as proof of his sharpness.

Helping shield the problem, people who have met with the president said, is that Biden has good days and bad days. Some people who were alarmed by his appearance in one meeting would be swiftly reassured when he was sharp and decisive in another.

As recently as this month, officials described him as energetic and clear-spoken in a three-hour meeting during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit. In the spring, he led multiple 30-minute calls addressing the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, where officials were impressed by his detailed knowledge and command of the issues.

Others say they realize now that they had simply been looking the other way. One longtime donor recalled that on the last three occasions he saw the president, Biden had repeatedly lost his train of thought and interrupted his sentence with “whatever.” The donor didn’t think much of it at the time. “I was probably rationalizing,” he said. “Subconsciously, you’re like—OK, I don’t think I can deal with this reality. What choice do I have? Nobody else is running.”

When Biden entered the White House in 2021, on the heels of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many government officials in the U.S. and abroad sighed with relief, eager for a less chaotic administration.

At first, Biden’s stumbles seemed like isolated incidents, such as when the president said the wrong country, or appeared confused, or fell three times walking up the stairs to Air Force One. Biden, after all, has described himself as a “gaffe machine.” People who know him said he has never been as effective an orator as Obama or others.

At the Group of Seven summit in England in June 2021, the first of Biden’s presidency, he repeatedly mixed up Syria and Libya at a news conference. The errors drew little attention as world leaders focused on celebrating Biden’s arrival. “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club,” said French President Emmanuel Macron after meeting with Biden.

Confused on G-7 call

In spring 2022, some European officials began to notice that something might be amiss. Biden was chairing an online video call on Ukraine with the G-7 leaders, a tightly scheduled discussion where Biden called on one leader at a time to give a statement. Sitting in the Oval Office, Biden at one point forgot to unmute his mic, then lost his train of thought and began mumbling, according to an official on the call. He appeared to lose the order of which leader should speak next, and then tried to end the call without calling on Macron. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intervened to remind him, and Macron was given his turn.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday Biden “rallied a global coalition to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and that “the results speak for themselves. How Joe Biden ran a Zoom call is a ludicrous anecdote.”

By the summer of 2022, some in Washington were beginning to comment on the president’s condition, privately and—on rare occasion—publicly. Some administration officials were noticing that Biden struggled to bring energy at White House events, particularly those later in the day, and often appeared to have difficulty reading the teleprompter. In September 2022, Biden called out for a deceased congresswoman during a public event, asking, “Where’s Jackie?” The lawmaker, Rep. Jackie Walorski (R., Ind.), had died the previous month in a car accident.

That fall, a former senior cabinet agency official began telling associates that Biden shouldn’t seek re-election, saying he wouldn’t be an effective candidate.

In November 2022, Democrats braced themselves for what some had predicted would be a red wave in the midterm elections, typically a challenging moment for the incumbent president’s party. Democrats’ performance far surpassed expectations: Republicans won an exceedingly narrow majority in the House, and Democrats expanded their majority in the Senate.

At that point, some lawmakers and donors close to the president expected him to announce he wouldn’t seek a second term. He had signaled during the 2020 campaign that he would be a transitional candidate, providing a bridge to a new era. But the success in the midterms had escalated Biden’s desire to run again, advisers said. Many longtime donors were surprised when it began to become clear he would do it.

After the midterms, Rep. Adam Smith (D., Wash.) said he approached some senators and people in the White House with a question: “Shouldn’t somebody run against Joe?” Smith also talked to one person who could conceivably be a Democratic presidential candidate, who was adamant: “We’ve got to stick with Joe.” The potential candidate argued that a “messy primary fight” would be pointless and told Smith: “We did it in 2020 with this coalition. It’s too risky to try to build a new coalition, or to build that coalition around a different candidate,” the congressman recalled.

On April 25, 2023, Biden announced he would run for re-election, declaring: “Let’s finish the job.” Days earlier, an NBC News survey had found that 70% of voters—including more than half of Democrats—didn’t want another Biden candidacy, with about half of that group citing his age as a major reason.

Biden, asked about his age that month, said: “I can’t even say the number—it doesn’t register with me.” He added that voters are “going to judge whether or not I have it or don’t have it. I respect them taking a hard look at it.”

Phillips, the Minnesota congressman, called other Democrats to see whether they would consider a run. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker didn’t take his calls, he said. Representatives for the governors didn’t respond to requests for comment. Phillips himself announced in October he would seek the nomination.

Party barriers

Building a campaign, however, was another matter. Many Democratic operatives, Phillips said, had been warned they would be blackballed if they worked with anyone other than Biden and said they couldn’t do it.

The Democratic National Committee, along with state Democratic parties, also erected barriers to other candidates. At Biden’s urging, the DNC moved the South Carolina primary up to first-in-the-nation status, which Biden cast as giving Black voters a louder voice. Some Democrats viewed the move as putting a thumb on the scales for Biden since that was the first nominating contest he won in 2020.

In Florida, the state party voted to submit only Biden’s name to election officials. Wisconsin’s state party also put forward only Biden’s name before the state Supreme Court intervened.

Many Democrats were heavily critical of anyone who suggested alternatives to Biden. At a Center for American Progress event, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota—the co-chair of the DNC’s rules committee—dismissed concerns about Biden’s age. “Everybody who says, ‘I wish he was younger.’ I wish I was skinnier!” he said. “There’s a responsibility for us not to buy into that.”

Top allies of the president, meanwhile, were encouraging the president to “own” his age and turn it into an asset. Movie mogul and campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg pointed to other icons born in the 1940s and still working today, such as Harrison Ford.

In July 2023, the White House’s management of Biden’s schedule drew the attention of European officials during a five-day swing that included a NATO summit in Lithuania and a Nordic summit in Finland. Some of Biden’s private meetings and other elements of his schedule were removed or their length was reduced, two European diplomats said, prompting NATO diplomats to talk among themselves about how Biden’s exposure was closely managed by his team. Biden’s team told Nordic officials and diplomats that this was a tiring trans-Atlantic trip and the president was old, said one of the European diplomats.

“Now, looking back, it was noticeable last year,” the diplomat said.

By the end of 2023, murmurs among Democrats about Biden’s condition had begun to grow. Donors who had met with Biden out West over the summer said the president appeared confused and disoriented at times. At a fundraiser in the fall, Biden told the same anecdote twice. At a White House Christmas party, a number of lawmakers who attended came away concerned about what they saw as a deterioration in Biden’s health.

That winter, John Morgan, a prominent Democratic donor, asked the president’s brother, Frank Biden, about Joe Biden’s stiffened gait, which had become increasingly apparent to those who observed him. Frank Biden assured Morgan, a Florida lawyer, that his ambling walk was the result of nerve damage in his feet and suggested it wasn’t cause for concern.

Morgan, who backed Biden publicly even as other donors turned on him, said he took him at his word. But he added that it was hard to judge whether Biden had more serious acuity issues. “What we don’t know fully is what’s the real story, because we’re not with him day to day,” Morgan said. Frank Biden didn’t respond to a request for comment.

‘That did worry me’

In 2024, the problems appeared to accelerate.

Less than three weeks into the new year, top Democratic and Republican lawmakers met with Biden at the White House to discuss how to push a new tranche of aid to Ukraine through Congress. Biden spoke so softly that some people struggled to hear him; read from notes to make obvious points; paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.

“He started looking like he was struggling more physically and mentally, probably by about the end of last year, to a degree greater than it had been before,” said Smith, the Washington congressman, in an interview, citing both the Jan. 17 meeting and the Christmas party. “That did worry me a little bit.”

Republicans who had met with Biden in the past saw the problems, too. “I did notice there was a cognitive decline,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, (R., Texas), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee and attended the Jan. 17 meeting. “It was very apparent to me in terms of how he spoke, it was a very low pitch, hard to understand. He had to use his notes quite a bit.”

A single week in February dealt a major blow to the White House’s efforts to shut down discussion over the president’s health. At a campaign rally on Feb. 4, Biden referred to Macron, the French president, as François Mitterrand, a previous leader who died in 1996. At a fundraiser on Feb. 7, he mixed up former German chancellor Angela Merkel with former chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017.

Then on Feb. 9, special counsel Robert Hur released a report on Biden’s handling of classified materials in which he described the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” with “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

Hur had a unique vantage point. Outside of Biden’s core staff and family, he was the only person to the public’s knowledge who had spent such an extended period interviewing the president, spending five hours over two days in October asking Biden detailed questions.

Biden showed detailed recall of long past events, including hitting a target in Mongolia with a bow and arrow. At other moments, White House counsel Ed Siskel had to jump in to prompt him, including when he failed to find the words “fax machine.” About 15 minutes later, the president struggled to find the same word. “You see where there’s a printer and there’s a—” Biden said. “What do they call it? The machine that—”

“Fax machine,” Siskel again reminded the president.

In fiery remarks at the White House after the report’s release, Biden pushed back at Hur’s characterization. “My memory is fine. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president,” he said. But during the speech, he made yet another flub: He referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi as “the president of Mexico.”

In March, Biden assuaged concerns about his age when he delivered to Congress a feisty, hour-and-seven-minute State of the Union address, where he went off script to parry Republican criticism of his agenda. Mingling on the floor following his speech, Democrats congratulated Biden. “Nobody’s going to talk about cognitive impairment now,” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler crowed.

Days later, European officials met with Biden at the White House for a late afternoon discussion focused on NATO security concerns and the Ukraine war. The president seemed reasonably sharp for the first half of the meeting, according to a person present.

But as the conversation wore on, the president began to flag noticeably, speaking slowly and at times in a way that was difficult to hear. Officials who had met him in previous years noted a sharp deterioration. The officials left the meeting saddened, feeling the president reminded some of their own parents as they aged, the person said.

Sullivan, on Sunday, said he was unaware of the events as described.

White House denials

Meanwhile, the White House was continuing to vigorously deny that there was a problem, dismissing concerns about Biden’s age as a Republican talking point. The Journal interviewed half a dozen senior administration officials this spring after learning that Biden had shown concerning signs of aging during private meetings. The officials uniformly denied that Biden’s acuity had declined and insisted he was as sharp as ever.

Those conversations included an hour-long interview in May with a senior administration official who, while sitting in a West Wing office, disputed the notion that Biden’s health was a problem and insisted that Biden was working harder than the staff.

When supporters expressed concerns to the campaign about Biden’s slip-ups, the campaign responded by pointing out Trump was only a few years younger than Biden. Some donors simply justified the president’s mistakes in other ways—saying they told themselves, ‘The speech didn’t start until 9 p.m. and the guy’s been running around all day,’ or, ‘Who among us hasn’t forgotten a name or two at a big party?’

Further dampening their worries was the fiery support from other big-name allies of the president, chief among them Katzenberg. When would-be donors told the former Hollywood studio chief they couldn’t support such an unpopular and frail candidate, they said the mogul often responded by saying he didn’t want to explain to his grandchildren that he had sat idly by while Trump regained power.

In early June, Biden traveled to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, where he struggled at times. That was when the Journal reported that Biden’s conduct in private meetings had alarmed other participants, both Democrats and Republicans, who said he showed signs of slipping.

The White House attacked the Journal’s reporting, describing the claims as false and politically motivated. Administration officials had worked behind the scenes for weeks to ensure Democrats gave the Journal favorable descriptions of the president, and lobbied aggressively to prevent the Journal from reporting material that showed the president’s acuity had declined.

Several congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, strongly defended Biden as sharp. Bates, the White House spokesman, used his official X account to attack the reporting, posting roughly 80 times and privately reaching out to journalists at other news outlets to criticize it.

Later that month, at the G-7 summit in Italy, senior diplomats privately said the president had deteriorated noticeably since the previous summer. One senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials in private discussions denied there was any problem.

Biden left the G-7 early to fly to California for a fundraiser hosted by actor George Clooney and other Hollywood stars. Appearing alongside Obama, Biden appeared at times to struggle through answers or keep up with the conversation.

Biden then flew to Camp David, where he spent nearly a week preparing for the debate. People with knowledge of the preparations said the president made several slip-ups during practice sessions. Advisers didn’t think the errors were unusual in part because they had grown accustomed to the president’s verbal mistakes. His performance was never as bad as it was on debate night.

On June 27, the Biden campaign took a fatal blow. During the debate, the president repeatedly lost his train of thought, confusing his words and staring with his mouth agape. The Biden campaign quickly put out the word that the president had a cold.

The next day, Biden sought to do damage control. At a rally in Raleigh, N.C., Biden delivered a more forceful performance using a teleprompter, where he acknowledged, “I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious.” At a fundraiser in New York later that day, first lady Jill Biden echoed the president’s comments and said that after the debate Biden told her, “You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that great.”

The appearance did little to calm Democrats’ concerns, as top White House and Biden campaign officials held one-on-one calls with key officials, donors and supporters. Democratic lawmakers began to discuss whether it made sense to keep Biden on the ticket.

Some of his allies privately groused that they hadn’t heard from the president. Biden waited nearly a week to call Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

The day after the debate, at a 50th birthday party for sports and entertainment executive Casey Wasserman in a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, politicians including former president Bill Clinton, Pelosi and others mingled with Hollywood executives. The debate was a constant topic of conversation, and partygoers wondered why Clinton, one of the Democrats’ best communicators and a stalwart Biden defender, wasn’t on the road stumping for the president.

“I’m waiting to hear from them,” Clinton told other guests. A Clinton spokesman declined to comment.

The White House said Biden “engaged with a wide range of governors, members of Congress, former officials and other leaders.”

Biden’s allies were enraged by the emerging mutiny. “Suck it up, buttercup,” said former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan. “You’re either with us, or you’re with Trump.”

Trump, meanwhile, at a rally in Chesapeake, Va., said voters should consider whether “America can survive four more years” with Biden in the White House. “In fact, I don’t know if we can really survive five more months.”

A fundraiser that weekend in East Hampton further raised alarm bells among donors. Biden was taking questions from the group of around a dozen people when he invited senior adviser Mike Donilon to supply some additional information. Donilon began answering donors’ questions after that, which struck some in the room as unusual, according to people familiar with the matter.

One donor said that if the campaign believed Biden remaining atop the ticket was the right way to go, they should share data to make that case, the people said. Donilon said Biden was polling better against Trump than any other Democratic candidate, even though many public and private polls didn’t show that to be the case.

Other top Democrats continued to assure worried donors and lawmakers that everything was fine. Obama went on X to defend Biden.

On July 1, Doggett, the Texas congressman, reached out to the White House and asked to speak to the president, telling them he believed it was important that Biden step aside. He said he never got a call back. The next day, he became the first sitting Democratic lawmaker to call for Biden to withdraw.

As the president began to ramp up his public appearances, he grew visibly frustrated by the questions about his mental acuity. Yet he acknowledged the toll of the campaign. In a meeting with Democratic governors, he said he needed to get more sleep and wanted to avoid events beginning after 8 p.m.

On Capitol Hill, unrest continued to grow. Smith, the congressman from Washington, called White House aides to inform them that he planned to call for Biden to step aside. White House officials begged him to wait until they had had a chance to talk, he said. “And then while they were out there telling everyone to keep it private, they were out there publicly saying there can’t be a problem because no one is saying anything,” he said.

He described the strategy as, “ignore the problem, nothing to see here, and run out the clock.”

Smith called for Biden to withdraw on July 8.

On July 10, the wall of support for the president began to crumble. As NATO leaders arrived in Washington for a summit, anxieties over Biden’s age dominated the talk in the hallways and cocktail hours—eclipsing even the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, officials present said.

Throughout the first day of the summit, the president seemed to hold his own, at first allaying any concerns. At the summit, Biden shook hands with all the leaders and greeted them for more than an hour. He was energetic throughout a three-hour meeting, sounded confident and spoke well. Biden, an official concluded, looked like he would get through the high-wire event unscathed.

But in the final few minutes of the last day, when Biden referred to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin,” an audible gasp swept through the crowd. World leaders and top officials from America’s close allies walked out into the hallway rueful that several extensively choreographed days meant to demonstrate NATO’s resolve in the face of Russia had instead, at the very end, been overshadowed by a gaffe—one that seemed to confirm the age anxieties the president’s supporters hoped the event would dispel.

Then, in a news conference closing out the summit, he referred to his vice president as “Vice President Trump.” Sullivan, the national security adviser, pressed his hand to his face. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flinched.

Biden demonstrated deep knowledge of foreign policy during the nearly hourlong press conference and spoke more clearly than at the debate. But the damage had been done. After the news conference ended, two more lawmakers called on him to withdraw from the race.

The White House pointed to foreign leaders’ praise for Biden during the summit.

Pelosi, who had publicly signaled Biden should reconsider his decision to stay in the race, was also working behind the scenes to try to reach a resolution, according to a Democratic lawmaker and people familiar with the conversations.

On July 13, Biden grew testy with lawmakers on a call with the New Democrats coalition, pushing back sharply when Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D., Pa.) said the president was losing Pennsylvania by 4 to 5 percentage points.

Schumer drove to Rehoboth, Del., that day to meet with Biden in person. In a 35-minute one-on-one meeting, he appealed to Biden’s legacy, the future of the country and the impact on Congress and the Supreme Court, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. “I do not expect you to walk out of this room making a decision,” Schumer told Biden at the conclusion of the meeting, “but I hope you will think about what I said.”

“I need another week,” Biden said. They hugged.

That night, the debate over whether he should stay in the race was upended in the course of seconds. At a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., a bullet whizzed toward Trump’s head as he recited his stump speech about curbing illegal immigration. Trump turned his head to look at a video screen displaying a chart, before putting his hand to his right ear and diving to the floor.

The failed assassination attempt, which killed one Trump supporter in the crowd, immediately turned the page, focusing attention instead on the bitter political divisions cleaving the nation. Biden declared the assassination attempt “contrary to everything we stand for as a nation.”

While the historic moment quieted the debate, it didn’t do away with it. In his Oval Office address, the president repeatedly vowed that the country would resolve differences at the “battle box”—instead of saying ballot box.

Within days, the calls for Biden to withdraw had resumed.

As the Republican convention unfolded, a display of unity for the GOP where some in the audience wore bandages on their ear in support of the president’s injury, top congressional leaders successfully pushed to delay a procedural vote on Biden’s nomination.

Donors began an all-out revolt, telling Schumer and Jeffries that it would get increasingly difficult to raise money not just for the presidential race, but also for congressional campaigns, if Biden didn’t drop out. Katzenberg met with Biden to warn him that fundraising for his race was weakening.

And then the president got Covid.

The White House announcement on Wednesday that he had tested positive forced him to cut short a Nevada campaign stop. His swift return to Delaware did little to help the growing furor. He appeared to struggle on the stairs to Air Force One and entering the car at the airport. The White House said his symptoms included “general malaise.”

As the weekend unfolded, the White House continued to testily deny that any discussions were under way over Biden withdrawing from the race. Biden, still recovering from Covid, said he planned to return to the campaign trail the following week.

On Sunday, at 1:46 p.m., the announcement came on social media.

“While it has been my intention to seek reelection,” the president wrote in a seven-paragraph letter, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.”

Daniel Michaels, Drew Hinshaw, Max Colchester, Emily Glazer and Lindsay Wise contributed to this article.

Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com, Siobhan Hughes at Siobhan.hughes@wsj.com, Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com, Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com and Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com