From the White House, Minutes After Biden Drops Out
A dispatch from the gates of the White House.
The first sign that something is happening: hundreds of people look down at their phones in unison. Faces lift slowly, eyes widen. And then the conversations begin.
“It has to be her,” a woman says to a group of five others in the shade of a tree. “It would be a slap in the face if she didn’t get it.” One of the men responds with talk of Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but then the conversation floats into the background, like the buzz of a distant fly.
I’m walking, quickly, in the low 90s humidity, across a city that’s derided as ‘the swamp’. It’s nearly 2:30pm on the Eastern Seaboard, July 21st, 2024, and the President has decided that he’s not going to run again. And I’m only a block away from the White House.
I turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the road that leads along the north side of the president’s home. A crowd is starting in Lafayette Square. There’s a DJ playing techno on a boombox, but he breaks in to say, “He has officially withdrawn from the race.” He cuts the music to a livestream of a newscaster. Her disembodied voice floats in the humid air and says what we know already from dozens of text threads and phone alerts.
A couple loudly walks past, “Not your house no more!” the wife says to her husband. Nearby a father walks with his young daughter. He’s holding her hand and saying, “This is a very historic moment.”
“What does that mean,” she asks him, “His-tor-ic.”
“It means that this has never happened before.”
When the secret service pulls back the temporary barriers along the road, everyone walks to the iron fences that surround the house. They reach 13 feet high. It’s as close to the house as we can get. People start to reach through the bars for clearer photographs. In clear view are the white columns, the white façade, and a large water fountain surrounded by red flowers vaguely blood colored.
Many of the cameras are pointed at a lone man. He’s holding a sign that says, ‘Bye Joe!’ The wide grin stretches across his face. Eventually the big cameras arrive, along with the photographers with badges and vests. He must know that he will end up in thousands of pictures, as precisely he does.
A pair of friends skip to the fence. “Holy shit!”, she says to her friend. She skips and twirls her leg about. “Bye Joe!? I love it.”
Another pair of friends in black dresses walk up. From their tote bags they pull out two wrapped popsicles. They poke the ice cream through the metal bars and reposition them so that they’re covering the White House. It doesn’t make sense until you look at the wrapper. The ice cream is coconut flavored.
The man with the sign has amassed a bit of a following. A man who looks vaguely like a hipster-Viking approaches him and interviews him for a radio show in Sweden. A woman comes and stands next to the man with the sign, holding a scrap of paper roughly the size of her hand. I can’t tell what it says, I’m sitting against the iron fence in the shade, along with the women with their coconut ice cream. I later see that it reads, ‘Thank you, Joe’, written quickly in red marker.
“I don’t know how ya’ feel about it, but I’d love a picture with ya’,” a man in a camouflage Trump hat says to the guy with the sign. The man’s son takes the pictures. The kid is wearing a baseball hat for a boutique archery company. “We can just crop her out,” the man says about the woman with the sign. As they’re both about to leave the pre-teen son tries to make some sort of joke about the president’s wife. He sounds like a toddler mimicking the language of Andrew Tate. Once they’re gone the man with the sign gets on the phone, talks loudly into his shoulder. “Yeah, they even interviewed me for Sweden!”
A guy on a bike rides up to the two sign holders. He speaks so everyone, especially so the journalists can hear. “This is America right here,” he says, “polite and respectful discourse, respecting differing opinions,” like he was reading from a textbook or reciting the pledge of allegiance.
To my left I can hear the plop of some of the coconut ice cream hitting the ground. The friends are looking at their phones, speaking excitedly. “I had a coconut coffee in DC hours before the announcement. Did I do this!?”
“We’re about to have so much context up in here,” another says.
“Wait. Read this, see if it’s anything.” She pulls up lyrics on her phone. “Knee deep / in the passenger seat / Joe Biden’s dropped out / is it Kamala now?”
But they mostly keep peering through the metal bars, and then back at the semi circle of photographers and press.
“We really should have brought a sign,” one says. And on the boombox the DJ starts playing ‘America the Beautiful’ by Ray Charles.
I start standing at some distance from the press, next to a woman and a daughter who have been silently watching the whole time. The conversation starts the only way one like this can; by admitting that what is happening is completely absurd. They are both from the deep south. She is visiting her daughter, who is an intern for a member of congress.
“And Trump was shot literally only a week ago.”
“It’s absolutely wild.”
“And Biden has Covid!”
“Biden has Covid!?”
“Mom, I tried to tell you that.”
“Yeah, you did try to tell me that, didn’t you.”
Thousands of books and articles will be written about all of this, but I don’t think a single brain could ever fully comprehend it. The President is hunkered down in a beach house in Delaware, feeling power slip away, sick with the disease that brought him to power. The man had said that only “the lord almighty” could make him reconsider running again. Well, did the all-powerful visit? This sure seems like Old Testament stuff to me. What did the angel say to Biden, ‘I’m sorry Joe but I got the call from upstairs. You have to drop out; God was really swayed by George Clooney’s op-ed,’?
I can see a familiar look in the southern woman’s face, one that I admire and fear. She is slack jawed, blinking slowly, shaking her head, mouthing words that aren’t for anyone in particular. “Oh my,” she whispers, “Oh gosh.” It is simultaneous awe and apprehension. The feeling of seeing the beautiful clouds turn black and purple on the horizon, knowing that right behind them are hurricane force winds. “Oh, what do you think will happen,” she asks. When others had asked those questions, it sounded like how people eagerly discuss cliffhangers in TV shows. But this isn’t entertainment to her. It is the force of wind, droughts, plagues. And the more we talk, and watch, the closer she stands towards her daughter, like she can magnetically tether her to the Earth.
A group of four people approach the fence. One of the figures is wearing a deep red shirt, labeled across the chest with the words ‘Palestine’. They turn towards a camera and push their fist through the iron bars. They tilt their head, pose, smile. And then their middle finger unfurls. And they keep it raised.
When I start to walk away the crowds thin out along the fence line. There are only a few people at this part of the fence. The pavement here is shaded by large oak trees that must be a hundred or so years old. The Swedish radioman paces and speaks into his recorder. Kids press against the iron railings. A couple with alien masks and ‘Make America Great Again’ hats pose in front of the White House. Another woman with a heavy drawl looks to her friend and says, “You almost gotta’ take-in a moment like that with a whole lot of people around you.”
All of these people, standing around the walls of a mansion that they will probably never see inside. In the sun it’s a gleaming monument, a landmark for selfies and postcards. But in the shade you can almost think it’s like any old house in this part of the country. Cicadas and crickets in the grass and the oaks. Like any old plantation it was made for the rich and powerful, built by hands that were chained and not fully recognized as human. But the hands are reaching in through the iron bars, scratching away at the white paint, revealing what’s really under it; an old house that is falling apart.
The closing paragraph is so powerful Michael. Loved all the evocations of sounds, sight and smell that you observed so keenly in midst of huge gusts of political winds changing direction.
What a moment to be in. You captured it so well.