Reporter Who Covered Biden for More Than 50 Years Calls on Him to Throw in the Towel: ‘A Selfish Man, Weakened by Age’

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

“President Biden should never have sought a second term” begins the brutally direct op-ed written by Curtis Wilkie , who describes himself as having “known Joe Biden longer than any reporter who ever covered him” — and the language only gets harsher from there.

Biden has remained adamant that he intends to forge ahead to November, but he’s faced growing calls from fellow Democrats to exit the race, and even former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has reportedly given the green light to Democrats in vulnerable districts to publicly call for Biden to step aside. Actor and major Democratic donor George Clooney dropped an op-ed in The New York Times calling for Biden to quit the race, saying that the “devastating” truth was that Biden was not the man he was a few years ago.

In a column for Mississippi Today published on Wednesday, Wilkie made clear he holds a similar view as Clooney, describing how he first met Biden in Wilmington, Delaware in the summer of 1971. At the time, Biden “was an ambitious 28-year-old New Castle County councilman” who was “smart, with a touch of the smartass, brash with a fondness for F-bombs, and a cut above the average county councilman,” and Wilkie, just two years older, was a reporter for the local paper.

Wilkie would go on to follow Biden’s long shot run for U.S. Senate and surprise win, accompanying him on the Amtrak ride from Wilmington to Washington, D.C. to watch the young Senator “introduce himself to everyone he encountered” so they didn’t think the barely-30-year-old Biden was “an elevator operator.”

In Wilkie’s view, there are many similarities between himself and Biden in their eighties, due to “the frailties of old age that grip us both and have begun to diminish our physical and cognitive powers,” concerns he held long before the president’s disastrous debate performance last month.

“This fall I’ll be 84 and Biden will be 82. I began worrying about both of us a couple of years ago,” wrote Wilkie, describing how he was having “incidents” he found “troubling,” where he forgot a “name of someone I know well” or a “simple word,” as well as mobility issues. The president, he noted, “had some of the same handicaps,” and “[h]is enthusiasm seems withered.”

The president “faces crises every day,” and the job makes “relentless demands” that “ravaged” much-younger occupants of the White House, Wilkie argued, and now it had “become painful to watch Biden on TV trying to demonstrate that he’s still capable of weathering the pressure.”

Biden could have “delivered a statesmanlike speech” and passed the torch to the younger generation after defeating Trump and having a presidency that was “mostly successful and free of catastrophe,” concluded Wilkie.

“Instead, his Democratic Party is faced with its worst nightmare, the distinct possibility of a sweeping victory in November for Trump and his MAGA followers. And instead of leaving a strong personal legacy, Biden may be remembered in the history of this turbulent period as a selfish man, weakened by age, who clung to his office too long.”

Read Wilkie’s column at Mississippi Today .