Joe Biden "failed this country in the most important job that he had" by deciding to run for another term as US president before dropping out of the election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, where he has unflin chingly assaulted democratic norms, the former representative Beto O’Rourke said recently. "We might very well lose the greatest country that this world has ever known," the Texan who has unsuccessfully run for the presidency and his state’s governorship said on Pod Save America. "And it might be in part because of the decision that Biden and those around him made to run for re-election." O’Rourke’s remarks made him only the latest of Biden’s fellow Democrats to lambast the former president for initially seeking to retain the Oval Office. Fresh criticism for Biden has poured in after a new political book, Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, asserted that he and his inner circle doomed the Democratic party’s chances of denying Trump a second presidency by hiding that his mental acuity had deteriorated until it was too late. Related: Newly released audio appears to confirm Biden’s memory lapses in 2023 Biden dropped out less than a month after a disastrous 27 June 2024 debate performance in Atlanta against Trump, from whom he had taken the presidency four years earlier. He endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him – but, with less than four months to campaign, she lost both the electoral and popular votes to her Republican foil, Trump. Trump’s second presidency has since been marked by brutal budget and staffing cuts to the federal government, detentions and deportations related to immigration, funding freezes aimed at institutions that his administration perceives to oppose its agenda, trade wars that have destab ilized financial markets and verbal attacks against judges whose rulings have impeded his wishes, among other things.

In his comments to Pod Save America, O’Rourke maintained that Democrats’ decision to run Biden – who turned 82 in November – despite polling showing many voters considered him too old to serve as president was a catastrophic miscalculation. Voters in 2024 evidently did not have the same concerns about Trump, who is only three years younger than Biden and in January became the oldest person ever inaugurated as US president. "To literally run the oldest guy who many people, accurately ... said, ‘I just don’t think he is capable of doing this’ ... I think that credibility problem is going to persist up until when Democrats say: ‘We fucked up and we made a terrible mistake,’” O’Rourke told the podcast. Related: Biden destroyed Harris bid by staying in race too long, top adviser says in book Top Harris campaign aide David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s winning charge to the presidency in 2008 with Biden as his running mate, is at least one Democrat who has said as much. He told the authors of Original Sin that Biden "totally fucked us" by waiting until late July 2024 to bail on his ambitions for an electoral rematch with Trump. A Biden spokesperson recently issued a statement reported by multiple news outlets that countered second-guessing about his decision to begin campaigning for a second Oval Office term by saying “evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity”. “We are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline,” the statement said, in part.

After being a member of the city council of El Paso, Texas, O’Rourke served three two-year terms in the US House beginning in 2013. The 52-year-old unsuccessfully ran for the US Senate in 2018, sought the Democratic White House nomination clinched by Biden in 2020 and lost Texas’s gubernatorial election to Greg Abbott in 2022.