Biden’s pullout

US President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign was not just a Sunday surprise for news junkies and the media — even his closest political allies and senior members of the Biden campaign were apparently caught off guard. In fact, less than two hours before the announcement, Biden campaign officials were urging journalists to stop speculating and focus on why Biden is the superior candidate. Instead, Biden himself chose to drop out “in the best interest of my party and the country”, suggesting he has finally accepted that there is no way for him to garner the support of enough independent voters to win in November. Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaces Biden as the presumptive nominee, has already picked up several key endorsements en route to the formal nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August.

Questions over Biden’s age and mental health, whether fair or not, have dominated public discourse to the extent that nobody is talking about the fact that the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, continues to drive fact-checkers to the point of madness.

Now, Trump — whose own mental acuity has been called into question — will replace Biden as the oldest person to ever run for president, immediately pitting the former president against his own campaign’s messaging. In Harris, Trump will also have an opponent that strikes at some of his weakest points. She is in her 50s, a woman of colour, born to immigrants from Jamaica and India, and cut her teeth as a criminal prosecutor before entering active politics. Donald Trump is almost 20 years her senior, was dogged by accusations of racism and civil rights violations relating to his properties, and is a convicted criminal. Even though Harris was justifiably criticised for her underwhelming public presence as vice president, she had proven herself to be a skilled orator in court, as attorney general of California, and later in the US Senate. If that Harris of the 2010s returns to the stage in the coming days and weeks, Trump is in for a rude awakening.