Liberal media members reacted with jubilation to President Biden's historic announcement that he would not seek a second term, calling him a patriot and reveling in the race being reset against former President Trump.
"What a man, what a patriot. What an act of selfless devotion to your country," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said on Sunday. "He has been a phenomenal president. He brought us back from COVID. He gave us the best recovery from COVID of any major nation on earth at a time when the world has economically been struggling in the wake of COVID. The Biden economy is literally the envy of the world. He ended the presidency of Donald Trump at one disastrous term, and he did it while being decent and civil and honorable and normal, and occasionally boring at a time when boring was absolutely what we needed."
"Legend," Jon Stewart, the influential "Daily Show" show host among the liberal voices skeptical of Biden's ability to beat Trump, wrote on X.
CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen gushed, "BREAKING: in one of the most stunning acts of patriotism of my lifetime— & worst news possible for Trump — Biden is out."
Biden dropped the bombshell in an open letter to the American people, marking the latest extraordinary development of the 2024 election cycle. After weeks of insisting he would not drop out as panicking liberals foresaw a loss to Trump in the aftermath of his disastrous debate performance, he succumbed. He is the first sitting president eligible for another term to not seek re-election since Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.
"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President," Biden wrote. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."
He added he would address the country later in the week about his decision. Biden also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party's nominee in his stead, with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago a month away.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a strong Biden ally, calling into the network to discuss the breaking news, said "The most telling thing about how positive this may be for the Democratic Party is the Republican response," noting Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and others were critical of what they viewed as an end-run to subvert Democratic primary voters, who overwhelmingly voted for Biden against token opposition.
This is the "one thing he feared," Scarborough said of Trump against a potential Harris candidacy.
"Donald Trump has always considered himself to be the ultimate disruptor," Scarborough said. "And for the first time not just in his political life, but the first time in his media life, in his professional life, the disruption is on the other side … Trump and his campaign team are going to have to respond to this shocking turn of events, and they're not happy about it at all."
"THANK GOD. Biden's finest hour. Now we can look forward to this," said left-wing Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a strongly anti-Trump writer and rabid Biden-Harris supporter.
"The importance of this moment goes beyond 2024. We are living in an era of catastrophically weak parties. Yet the Democratic Party, for all its faults, came together to exercise collective authority at a critical moment in exactly the way the GOP failed to do in 2016. It matters," liberal journalist Max Fisher wrote on X.
Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, a co-host of "Pod Save America," praised Biden for his selflessness.
"A courageous and selfless decision. The President did what he’s done for the last four years - he listened to the American people and put the country’s interests ahead of his own," he wrote. "The exact opposite of Donald Trump."
Others gleefully noted that Trump, who accepted the Republican nomination last week at age 78, is now officially the oldest major party nominee in American history. Biden, 81, previously set the mark in 2020 at age 77 and is already the oldest president in the country's history. They appeared to be trolling to a degree, as many Democrats and administration members have taken criticism in recent weeks that they purposefully withheld Biden's mental health decline from the public.
Harris, who will turn 60 in October, is nearly 18 years Trump's junior, and liberals took to X en masse to write Trump was now the "oldest nominee" ever.
"She's running against the oldest nominee for president of the United States in American history," said CNN's Bakari Sellers, appearing to revel in the shifting dynamics. "So when you have this type of change election, this type of generational divide … The man is nearly 80 years old and so the question is, can he serve another four years? I'm not sure he can."
Biden's decision to drop out capped a brutal period for the president as he watched, pride wounded, while top Democrats and liberal media allies said he should step aside from his re-election effort for the good of the country.
Through it all, Biden stubbornly insisted he wasn't going "anywhere," but he finally changed his mind.
