New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof on Why Biden Should Drop Out: ‘I Think We Can Get a President Who Is Coherent in the Evenings’

Nicholas Kristof, longtime opinion columnist for The New York Times, fondly recalls, among other things, working with President Joe Biden – then a senator of Delaware – on curbing the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in the early 2000s. Yet the Biden he saw on Thursday’s debate stage led him to publish a column minutes before the debate was even over, headlined “President Biden, I’ve Seen Enough.”

“It wasn’t just a bad debate performance,” said Kristoff in a lengthy interview on this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club. “I think it was probably the worst debate performance since modern debates began in 1960.”

In a wide-ranging discussion with Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin, Kristof explained his thinking and why he has joined so many other journalists and commentators — including many who are fond of Biden and his accomplishments — in calling for him to step aside.

“I do think there is a serious risk that Trump will win against Biden. And I think that would be a risk that I’m extremely uncomfortable with,” he said. He also addressed his exclusion of Vice President Kamala Harris from a list of potential replacements in his column, saying the omission was intentional. “I think that somebody like Gretchen Whitmer, from a state that is in play, is probably a better bet.”

Kristof also spoke about his recent column on the horrors in the West Bank, how Biden’s policy towards Israel has been a failure, the vital importance of the reported column, and his new book Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: Let’s start with the debate between Biden and Trump. You were one of the first voices out with a piece in the wake of the debate calling for President Biden to drop out of the race. Tell us why you decided to write that piece.

Nicholas Kristof: So it wasn’t just a bad debate performance. I think it was probably the worst debate performance since modern debates began in 1960. Biden is right, that this is an existential race, that there’s an enormous amount at stake. Precisely because he’s right about that, I think it’s incredibly important that we have a candidate who can win in November. And he was already doing poorly in the polls before the race, but I had hopes that the economy was going to improve, that things would get better. And then at the debate, he had the job of reassuring people that the narrative about him being too old was not true. And instead, he tended to confirm that narrative. I like him, I admire him, but I think that we can find a candidate who can do better in that absolutely critical race.

I think there’s been some conflation in the arguments from Biden’s defenders who have suggested that the call for Biden to drop out is an argument that Trump is better than Biden. But that’s obviously not the case: Most people that are arguing for Biden to drop out are saying, “We agree that Trump is a unique threat to the United States, and that is why it is so imperative that Biden drop out and a candidate better suited to beating Trump replace him.” Is that the way you see this?

Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s precisely because Biden is right about the stakes of the race that it’s important that we do everything we can to win. And I think that doing everything we can to win in November means that we get a nominee who can probably do a better job. And obviously there’s risk in that, but there’s also risk in staying with the president. And it’s not just about winning in November. There are also larger issues about how well Biden will be able to perform the job of the presidency in four and a half years. And I’ve been complaining for years and years and years about Republicans not caring about the nitty-gritty of governance. I think that if we’re going to make that complaint about Republicans, we also have to be willing to look in the mirror and ask tough questions about the ability of the person who we admire and vote for to actually carry out the duties of the presidency four and a half years from now.

Did you take any heat for that piece, either from readers or from the Biden team?

I did not hear from the White House. They may have thought it was just beyond hope. I’m not sure. But I did hear from a lot of readers, some welcoming what I said and some outraged. I’ve been writing a lot about Gaza, and I get more poisonous emails about Gaza than I do about Biden. But we dish it out, we’ve got to be willing to take it.

The White House and a number of Democrats are publicly defending Biden. And one of the arguments that I’ve heard is that he just had a bad night. What’s your assessment of that argument, that this was a blip on an otherwise fine performance for Biden as president?

It’s possible that this was the equivalent of a thousand-year flood, but there were enough warnings about it, there were enough signals that there might be a problem here, that I’m nervous that it’s not. And fundamentally, we’re not going to have a chance to change the nominee if we wait. Now if Biden comes out and gives dozens of interviews without a teleprompter in tough circumstances, then maybe he can reassure people. And that would be great, but one of the arguments that I’ve heard a lot is that he just had an amazing term, he got a lot done. That’s true, but in households across the country, we’re having conversations with elderly parents about whether they can drive or whether we should take away the car keys. It’s not an argument on their behalf that they used to drive just fine. The question is, how will they drive for the next four years?

It’s also not an argument that they occasionally drive fine, but they had an off day. You want the person behind the wheel to be fairly consistent in their performance as a driver because of the stakes involved with them being on the road. Do you think that the White House and the Biden campaign are now being honest about the president’s condition, or do you feel like they are not?

I just don’t know. The job of the White House is to spin. So I am sure they are spinning, but how often Biden is completely brilliant and lucid, and how often does he have senior moments? I have no idea at all. But fundamentally, in 2020, Biden got the Democratic nomination not because everybody was in love with him, but because they thought he was the best person around to beat Donald Trump. And so it’s only fair now that we have a similar conversation about who was the best person in 2024 to beat Donald Trump.

What do you make of the argument that we’ve heard that it’s fantastical to expect Biden to drop out now, and that opening up a contest for the nomination at this point would be a disaster for Democrats, given how risky a proposition that is with just some 40 days until the conventions.

I worry about that. That has gone through my mind that I may be making an argument that Biden will completely dismiss, that he will stay in the race. And in that case, I and those like me, we end up weakening him further. And I worry about that. I think that’s a legitimate risk. I do think though, that the stakes are high enough that we have to do everything possible to get the strongest nominee. So I’m trying to make a calculated risk that there will be pressure on him to step down and withdraw, and then we can have a stronger candidate.

You didn’t mention Kamala Harris in your piece, though you mentioned several other candidates you think would be strong nominees to run against Trump. Was that deliberate, the omission of Kamala Harris?

Yes. In the sense that I think that there are stronger candidates than Vice President Harris. I think she would be plausible. And I think if indeed Biden is regularly weakened, then she might well be a stronger candidate than he is. But I think that somebody like Gretchen Whitmer, from a state that is in play is probably a better bet. There are other people that I would prefer to be in the White House than Gretchen Whitmer. I think Cory Booker is an incredibly talented guy. I think he could do great things for the country, but I don’t think New Jersey is a state that is in play. I do think Michigan is. And I think Whitmer might be more likely to win in November than the vice president. And that’s why I mentioned the people I did.

The New York Times editorial board also published a piece calling on Biden to drop out of the race, which is a big effing deal, to borrow a phrase from the current president. From all the reporting I’ve seen, aides close to Biden have dismissed that. They’ve said that The New York Times editorial board calling on Biden to drop out is only going to make him want to stay in the race more. What sort of impact do you think those big swings from the Times editorial board will have on a decision like this from Biden?

I think that in general in America, we overstate the impact of the media when we make arguments about things like this that people have thought of. Where we in the media have the greatest power is highlighting an issue that is neglected and projecting it onto the agenda and thereby getting people to talk about it. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that Biden is likely to say, “Oh look, Nick Kristof suggested I drop out, and boy he makes a good argument,” or I don’t think he’s going to say that about The Times editorial or others.

What about Tom Friedman? Do you think he’s got the clout?

I think he will read Tom closely, but I think that Biden probably has his own personal views about this and is unlikely to be persuaded. I think that the argument of the polls will matter a lot. And we’re beginning to see polls come in. They are somewhat inconsistent so far. In the coming days, we will see more polls. And I think that if it is evident that President Biden did not take a big hit, then I think that’s a good argument for him to stay in. If, on the other hand, it looks as if he did take a significant hit, and if it becomes more likely that Democrats lose both the House and the Senate, then I think there will be more calls on him to withdraw. But I think that data will probably count for a little more than what we in the bleachers shout down.

Do you think the media failed in any sense by not telling voters adequately the story of Biden’s decline, maybe with some more urgency? I find myself not entirely convinced by that argument because I think there was a pretty robust discussion and debate about Biden’s mental fitness and age in the last couple of months. But do you think the media failed in any way, perhaps in not penetrating those concerns within the White House and revealing them to the public?

It’s not obvious to me. What I had heard from people in senior places was that Biden was actually pretty lucid. And that’s why it was a real surprise to see him flood the debate like that. Now, if reporters had been able to unearth signs of systematic decline, then, boy, they fumbled by not reporting that, but it’s just unclear to me that it was possible to report that out earlier.

One of the lines that stuck out to me from Biden at the debate was when he was talking about world leaders and he said, “No one thinks we’re weak. No one wants to screw around with us. Nobody.” And that was in response to Trump needling him and saying that nobody respects the United States anymore, they walk all over us. And I thought that was a notable claim from Biden because obviously, during his administration, Putin invaded Ukraine. Benjamin Netanyahu has humiliated Biden quite a few times. And you wrote a piece recently about why Netanyahu doesn’t take Biden seriously. You cited his red line warning to Netanyahu on Rafah when Biden said, “It is it is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel.” You wrote that “What that added up to was not clear, perhaps even to Biden.” I went back and read that after watching the debate, and it made me wonder, having watched this debate, do you think Biden’s fitness has something to do with the fact that his policy towards Netanyahu has been, by many accounts, feckless?

I think that Biden, whom I’ve admired for many years, I’ve known for many years, I think he has flubbed on the Middle East. I think he has shown weakness toward Netanyahu in ways that have enabled Netanyahu to walk all over him. I think something similar is true of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia. But I’m not sure how much that projects to the way leaders in other parts of the world, for now, respond. In Ukraine, there was some inconsistency that in general, Biden did an amazingly good job of rallying Europe to stand up to Russia. On the other hand, he was quite reluctant to transfer weapons to Ukraine in ways that might provoke Russia. I worry that we send a signal to China, for example, that nuclear blackmail works. In the case of Asia, I think the Biden administration has done a very good job of projecting strength without provoking China and working with the Philippines and Japan and South Korea and Australia, etc., so I think it’s kind of an inconsistent picture internationally.

So just looking at the Biden administration and its record as a whole, there’s not a concern that not only Biden can’t beat Trump, but also that Biden can’t do the job that he’s currently doing as president as a result of what we saw at that debate?

Sure, I would worry about what’s going to happen over the next four and a half years if what we saw during that debate was a glimpse of the way Biden is in the evenings. On the other hand, it does go back to the point that I would worry less about a Biden who is stumbling than about a Trump who was not stumbling. But I think we can do better and get a president who is coherent in the evenings and who can also win and who is not Trump.

Coherent around the clock is ideally the goal. In your piece about Netanyahu, you also write that Biden’s Gaza policy has been, “A moral, practical and political failure that has not helped anyone but Netanyahu.” And then in your piece calling on Biden to drop out, you start by saying that Biden is a good man who capped a long career in public service with a successful presidential term. Can you reconcile those two arguments? That, on the one hand, his policy with regard to one of the most urgent and consequential issues of the moment has been a moral, practical, and political failure, yet on the other, he’s had a successful presidential term?

Look, presidencies are complicated. I thought that Obama was very good in foreign policy in many ways, but I thought Syria was a complete mess. LBJ, going way back, was a disaster in foreign policy and brilliant in domestic policy. And Biden is somebody who I think is quite smart on foreign policy. I think he’s got good aides around him. I think he cares deeply about humanitarian issues. And we saw that in Bosnia, we saw that in Darfur, where I worked with him a lot on that. But meanwhile, in the Middle East, I think he just comes from a generation, he talks about meeting Golda Meir and this kind of thing. I think it is just not within his DNA to stand up to an Israeli prime minister. And he keeps offering this advice to show restraint, and he just refuses to impose serious conditions and to twist Netanyahu’s arms, but people do things that I disagree with quite regularly. I think that Biden’s Middle East policy is an example of that. I think it’s a failure, and I think it’s creating a situation that is more dangerous in the Middle East. But meanwhile, I think he’s done a very good job in Asia. And it’s all complicated.

You recently returned from a trip to the West Bank. I read your piece in the Times last Sunday. What did you see there and what’s going on in the West Bank now? You describe it as a powder keg that is ready to explode.

So settlers are out of control. Backed by the Israeli government, they are stealing Palestinian land. They are attacking Palestinians. And there is a generational gap among Palestinians and older folks are saying, we don’t want another intifada. We don’t want to turn to violence because we’ll end up losing in that. And meanwhile, young people are saying, look, you keep preaching restraint and all we do is lose our land and get kicked off. And the only thing the Israelis understand is violence. And that dialogue is happening in homes across the West Bank. Just about maybe every Palestinian I spoke to said that they fear we are right on the edge of an explosion there, and that will be very, very bloody if that happens.

To put it into perspective, there are 2 million people in Gaza, 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and something like 750,000 settlers. And you’ve had 500 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since October 7th. It’s not even where the war is happening. And yet these settlers are allowed by the Israeli government to pretty much run rampant, steal land, and murder, often accompanied by IDF soldiers. So, I can only imagine that’s getting to a point where it could erupt. Tell us about Abdel, a farmer in the West Bank that you spoke to.

Abdel-Majeed is a guy that I met in 2015 in his village, Qusra. And at that point, I thought life was about as bad for him as it could get. You had settlers already stealing his land, already cutting down his olive trees. And he’s this guy in his 70s. He’s not exactly a big threat. Then I went back and visited him, and it turns out that everything is getting worse, and they barred him from some of his own land. They have cut down more of his trees. They burned four of his family’s cars. They destroyed his tractor. A week before I arrived, they set fire to his sheep shed with his sheep inside. They tried to invade his home when his granddaughter was there. And so now his wife is telling him, look, we gotta go. We gotta abandon this house, it’s not worth getting firebombed and being burned to death. And it’s tragic when you see that. And when you multiply that by vast numbers of homes across the West Bank and again, it bothers me because it feels to me as if the U.S. is somewhat complicit in this. We are providing some of the weapons that are used to enforce this kind of inequality. And we have defended Israeli policies at the U.N., we protected it there. And the biggest West Bank land grab was just announced this spring, and the Biden administration did not protest seriously. I think it’s also just counterproductive for Israel. An explosion would be the last thing that Israel needs right now. They’ve got the war in Gaza. There’s a real risk of a war with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. And now the possibility of an explosion in the West Bank would be a catastrophe for everybody.

You mentioned that sometimes you get angry mail about your writing on Gaza. The story about the West Bank, is that the kind of story that you hear from readers about?

Yeah, I get a lot of indignant, indignant mail from readers. I must say that when I was on the book tour, promoting Chasing Hope, it was wonderful because I have one foot in social media and that’s this toxic space where everybody’s full of hate and full of confidence and knows everything. And meanwhile, on the book tour at almost every stop, I was asked about Gaza, but people were asking these questions with genuine curiosity. They were struggling with the moral complexity of being outraged by what happened on October 7th, and yet also being horrified by what has happened since, and trying to sort out their moral obligations and those of the US in a really healthy way. It was nice to see people who were ambivalent.

That’s a good lesson for everyone: get outside, log off of Twitter. You’ve been writing about this subject in a very thoughtful and human way for years. What do you think about how the American media covers not only this conflict but how it covers this current war? Do you think that the American media is doing a good job, or are they falling into any traps?

There’s been a huge range in how it’s been covered, depending in part on the news organization. It’s been complicated by the fact that we can’t get reporters, for the most part, into Gaza, except accompanied by the IDF. I had been trying since last fall to get into Gaza, volunteering with medical organizations, and you just can’t get in. You just can’t. Israel won’t let you in. I think in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, we tended to be so focused on October 7th, that we weren’t focused enough on the fact that what happens next, it seemed to me, was pretty obvious right from the beginning. That what was going to happen was going to be pretty awful. And Israeli officials were pretty open about cutting off food, for example. And so I don’t think, in some cases, people were alert enough to what was going to happen until after it had happened. I think we were maybe a little bit slow overall to look at what has happened to Palestinian prisoners. There are increasing reports that some of the treatment has really been horrific. At the end of the day, I think that Hamas is a brutal, misogynistic, homophobic organization that has been terrible for Palestinians. So I don’t think that there is a moral equality between Hamas and Israel. But I do think that there is a moral equality between Palestinian civilians in Gaza and Israeli civilians in Israel. And, I think that we forget that those folks on the Gaza side of the border are just like you and me. Half of them are children. Vast numbers are dying, are hungry. And we have to cover that horror, especially when it’s inflicted with U.S. weapons and paid for in part by U.S. taxpayers.

Did you have any reservations about trying to go to Gaza? Because I had Arwa Damon, who has been a CNN international correspondent for years on this show, and she visited Gaza on a humanitarian mission, and she said it was unlike anywhere she’d ever been before. And obviously she’s covered Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. Did that give you pause about traveling there, or is that just something that is in your DNA — that if there’s a conflict going on, you’re going to go there?

It gave my wife pause. We had some discussions about that. She thought I was completely crazy. I’ve had some doctor friends who’ve gone into Gaza and volunteered in hospitals there, and that was the context where I was going to try to go in and get permission by volunteering in a hospital. There are a lot of situations where you try to weigh the benefit of additional reporting and firsthand reporting against the risks– risks to yourself, to your interpreter, to your driver. And those are really hard decisions. We don’t always get them right. In my book, I argue that, in fact, we’ve often been too careless about our own lives and those of people who work with us. But Gaza, there are enough people dying, being killed with our weapons, that I think it is worth the risk of trying prudently, cautiously, to get that firsthand reporting.

I read recently someone said that you have kept the tradition of the front-line columnist alive. What do you think the value of these kinds of reported columns are, where you’re actually traveling to go to the place that you’re writing about, spending time there, doing interviews as opposed to sitting in your office in Montclair, New Jersey, and spouting off?

I deeply believe in going out and reporting. I think one example of the benefits of that was the run-up to the Iraq war. It was horrifying to me to see all these people who were inside the bubble and were saying how Iraq was going to benefit from the war. And meanwhile, I went to Iraq before the war. And it was manifestly clear to me that Iraqis didn’t like Saddam Hussein. And they also didn’t like the idea of us invading. And if we invaded, they were likely to start shooting at our soldiers. And boy, I just absolutely believe that we need to get out and report and kick tires and get out of the capital. I think that makes a real difference.

Speaking of the Iraq War and your coverage of it, a few years ago Andrew Sullivan apologized to you for attacking you over your opposition to the Iraq War. He was sneering at your reporting that the Iraqis didn’t want the US to invade. Watching what’s going on now in Gaza and the US response to it, do you feel like the pundit class has learned at all from those mistakes? Do you think that our coverage and our understanding of the United States’ place in the world, and our involvement in these foreign conflicts has improved? Or do you think we’re making the same mistakes we were back when we invaded Iraq?

I think in many ways we’re making the same mistake. And I think part of that, this is a strange thing for a pundit to admit, but that we have too much punditry and not enough reporting, and that at the end of the day, where we in journalism really add value is when we add to the soup. In general, you add to the soup by being out in the field and talking to people, ideally having languages. I think that one reason why our foreign policy sometimes isn’t better is that we often have leaders in foreign policy who haven’t lived abroad, who have risen through the foreign policy establishment in Washington, and they know Washington really well, but they don’t always have this intuitive sense of how other countries and other peoples will react to our policies. So I worry that if you’re running a TV program, it’s a lot easier to get a couple of people in the studio from Washington and have them pronounce about whether Gaza or whether Venezuela or China or whatever. And it’s a lot more expensive to send people and sometimes more dangerous to send people out to cover these issues. But in journalism, it’s that reporting that really adds the most value, I believe.

Are you worried that in an era where the media industry is struggling to find profitable models, the kind of reporting that you do, trips to the West Bank, for example, to write a column about what’s going on there, do you worry that’s in danger or are you optimistic in any way that the media industry is always going to find a way to fund that kind of journalism?

I think that we have a real crisis in a business model for this kind of journalism. It’s a lot easier in the case of the West Bank. Sudan right now is probably an even greater humanitarian crisis than Gaza. And nobody is covering Sudan. CNN sent Anderson Cooper to eastern Congo in 2005 and he did great reporting. But I understand that his ratings fell that week compared to rival channels. And CNN hasn’t let Anderson anywhere near Congo since. And that does reflect a business model crisis. The Gates Foundation gave a grant to ABC News to cover global development issues some years ago. And ABC did really fine coverage. And then a year later, the Gates Foundation was going to renew the grant. And ABC said, actually, we don’t want that grant, because we find that when we show these stories, people then switch the channel. And I find that really dispiriting. You are absolutely right that we need to work on a business model for covering these stories.

Tell us about your new book, Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. What story did you want to tell with this book when you set out to write it?

I wanted to bring people into the kind of stories that I care deeply about. I think that the narrative of a memoir is a way to suck people in. I begin with a plane crash in Congo. I’m held at gunpoint, there’s a drama that I hope can get people in. But also I wanted to talk about why journalism matters. It’s in many ways a love letter to journalism. I think that at our best, we do really good stuff. I also think that we miss a lot of stories. And part of the book is also about going from covering humanitarian crises in other countries, to recuperating in my hometown here in Yamhill, Oregon, and finding a humanitarian crisis right here. A third of the kids on my old school bus are now gone from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. And I don’t think that we as a country have nearly addressed that crisis enough right now.

For those who don’t know, you’ve had an extraordinary career. Could you walk us through how you went from a reporter to an international correspondent to a columnist?

I was hired a little bit by mistake, perhaps, by The New York Times to cover business and economics, about which I had actually very little interest. I faked it and was a correspondent for The New York Times in Los Angeles, where I met my wife and New York Times colleague Sheryl WuDunn, and then was assigned to Hong Kong. And then because Hong Kong is kind of in the neighborhood of China, and China at that point didn’t seem to matter very much, we were made China correspondents for The New York Times. At that point, we were the only two people covering all of China. And we arrived just before Tiananmen– the Tiananmen democracy movement and the massacre that ended it. And that was just over 35 years ago. And I think about that in this country, we have a lot of people who have been undermining democracy and taking for granted the democratic institutions and guardrails and referees that make it work because we inherited them. And meanwhile, in China, I saw people dying and risking their lives because they understood the value of democracy, understood what difference it would make in their daily lives. And I think there’s a lot we can learn from those Chinese who I saw, I was on Tiananmen Square that terrible night, who were dying around me. One story I’ll never forget: when the troops were coming in to crush the student protesters, some of them came in on the old airport road, and there was a bus driver, a salt-of-the-earth working-class bus driver, who saw them coming and hurriedly parked his bus across the road to block the troops and trucks. All the trucks and the troops had to stop. And an officer got out of the lead truck and demanded that the driver move the bus. And the driver refused. And the officer pointed his gun at the bus driver and said, move the bus. And at that point, the bus driver, he had the keys to the bus in his hand, and he just hurled them into this high grass by the side of the road. And it was night. And the courage that takes, I’m inspired by that 35 years later. I wish that we in the U.S. and in Europe would appreciate the willingness that people who don’t have democracy have to sacrifice to achieve it, because maybe we could learn something from that now.

Optimism, I think it’s fair to say, courses through this book. What is the optimistic case for the 2024 election and the future of America?

Well, you’re pushing me a little bit because right now I don’t feel too optimistic about about 2024. If you push me, I think it is certainly possible that the Democrats will win, whether it’s Biden or somebody else. And I think at that point, it is also plausible that Republicans would come to their senses and would understand that they’re not going to win more than 46 or 47% of the of the vote nationally. They have a good instinct to compete for working-class voters around the country. I think that’s a sensible strategy. But they can’t be crazy. And they can’t be misogynists. I think there’s some possibility, this is kind of the Liz Cheney theory of how it might play out, that then people go back to something that is a little more rational. I think that’s plausible. Politics goes in waves. I’ve seen that over my life and career, and anybody who thinks that the US has never been this divided doesn’t remember just how brutal it was in the 1960s. I think that we can recover again, just as we did then. I think there’s a lot of underlying strengths we have in this country.

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