Vermont Sen. Peter Welch became the first Democratic senator to call for President Joe Biden to quit his reelection campaign.
Welch penned an op-ed for The Washington Post that was published Wednesday evening that dubbed 81-year-old Biden ‘one of the best presidents of our time.’
But then he noted that we ‘cannot unsee President Biden’s disastrous debate performance’ nor ‘ignore or dismiss the valid questions raised since that night.’
‘I understand why President Biden wants to run. He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again,’ Welch wrote. ‘But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so,’ he wrote.
‘In my view, he is not,’ the Vermont senator concluded. ‘For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.’
Welch listed off all the reasons why former President Donald Trump doesn’t deserve reelection.
‘Trump is a felon. He is a pathological liar. He is a menace,’ Welch said, adding that Trump will be ’emboldened’ by the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
The Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025,’ which Trump has distanced himself from, contains an ‘extremist agenda,’ the Vermonter argued.
But, Welch, said, the national conversation has swirled around Biden’s competency and age.
‘Only he can change it,’ Welch urged.
The senator added, ‘I deliver this assessment with sadness.’
He pointed out that while Biden got a bigger percentage in Vermont than any other state in the 2020 race ‘regular Vermonters are worried that he can’t win this time, and they’re terrified of another Trump presidency.’
‘We have asked President Biden to do so much for so many for so long. It has required unmatched selflessness and courage,’ Welch said. ‘We need him to put us first, as he has done before.’
‘I urge him to do it now,’ Welch said.
With Welch’s admission, now a handful of Democrats from both houses in Congress have pleaded with Biden to bow out.
Overall, nine Democratic House members have said it’s time for Biden to go.
The president has, so far, resisted.
Biden was dining with leaders of NATO at the White House when the Welch news broke.
Welch’s op-ed was published hours after actor George Clooney, an influential Biden supporters, made the same ask with his own op-ed, this one published in The New York Times, Wednesday morning.
Clooney was one of the co-hosts of Biden’s glitzy Los Angeles fundraiser last month – where one of his so-called ‘freezing’ episodes appeared to take place.
Biden stuck around onstage for a moment and then was escorted off by former President Barack Obama.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed that the footage was deceptively edited, calling it a ‘cheap fake’ from the podium.
But Clooney’s editorial suggested that the video contained the truth – that the 81-year-old had lost a step.
The actor wrote that ‘one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.’
‘None of us can,’ he continued.
‘It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,’ Clooney said. ‘He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.’