It was half of the right thing to do.

Joe Biden should have resigned the presidency this afternoon — nobody in his obviously parlous physical state has any business operating as commander-in-chief, much less running for office. But at the very least, he has formally stepped down from the presidential race, in a statement that reads like it was written by his aides for him at gunpoint, and perhaps without his direct knowledge. There was a later, weirdly separate endorsement of Kamala as his heir-perhaps, almost as if he’d made a last-second decision to switch his place with her atop the Dr. Strangelove H-bomb, the one plummeting toward November. But there was no stirring rhetoric, and certainly no immediate national address — they’re going to need to make sure ol’ Joe is the proper “headspace” for that one, to put it delicately — just a limp, rhetorically hollow “so long, and thanks for all the fish.”

In late July. After the primary. After the first debate. A month before the Democratic convention. With no agreed-upon successor, nobody vetted, nobody remotely acceptable to all factions of the Democratic Party. Party delegates are enraged, disunited, and confused. Protesters are out in the streets. And it all heads straight for my hometown of Chicago, come late August — where I expect our mayor to be cheering the rioters on, rather than suppressing them.

A thousand think pieces will be written about this momentous event — and make no mistake, we have just witnessed American history — yet I suspect none of them will offer any clarity until America gets a sense of who its new Democratic nominee is. (There are no good options for a party heading ever more clearly for the same sort of civil war that ripped the Republican Party apart during the ’10s — Harris’s flaws are known to all, and those who think parachuting Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro onto a national ticket will instantly solve the festering rot within the Democratic coalition seem to misunderstand that its problems predate any panic about Biden’s suitability for office.) Democrats now have at least some sense of hope, having sloughed off the shackles of Biden’s broken body. But given factional intra-party politics and the frank disgust of the national electorate with the party, the idea of a “fresh start” may be of limited utility this late in the game for 2024. Trump, however, remains forever Trump: historically unpopular as a potentially victorious presidential candidate despite all that has happened.

I conclude for now — and we will all resume writing soon, the second we’re done catching our breath — with a feeling of intense resentment for Joe Biden, his handmaidens and collaborators within the administration and the mainstream media, and the Democratic Party as a whole for inflicting a national debacle upon America. (As a Chicagoan, I also harbor a very particular resentment.) I keep returning to the simple truth that Joe Biden’s decline was knowable long ago, as far back as the earliest days of his administration. The denouement to this civic drama has not been fully written yet, but at this point one thing is certain: It is being written as a tragedy.