We are where we are.

Those of us who watched the whole 90-minute debacle last Thursday night will never forget what we saw: a clearly exhausted and often confused Joe Biden struggling to reach the end of his sentences—sometimes in vain—while an energetic if clearly unhinged Donald Trump radiated menace and mendacity in equal measure. That pathetic—indeed, given the reactionary playbook outlined in the GOP’s Project 2025 agenda, terrifying—performance simply cannot be undone by any amount of optimistic spin or stage-managed speeches.

Those who pretend otherwise do this country no service, inevitably bringing to mind Marx’s challenge: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” (Chico, not Karl.)

Which means we all—not just Joe Biden, or his family, or the tight circle of advisers he listens to, or the Democratic Party’s big donors, but everyone who cares about the preservation of our democracy—must acknowledge that there are only three possible options: Biden continues his campaign; he resigns the presidency in favor of Kamala Harris; he remains as president but ends his candidacy for reelection and releases his delegates, allowing them to choose the party’s nominee in Chicago in August.

All of these options are fraught with peril. And none of them guarantee victory over Donald Trump, who has maintained a small but significant polling lead over Biden since April, and was given a 66 percent chance of winning the election by Nate Silver even before the debate. In assessing each option, it’s worth bearing in mind that the task—Job One for any Democratic nominee—is both to make up that deficit and to provide sufficient momentum for the party’s House and Senate candidates to win the races that will be crucial in thwarting Trump’s authoritarian agenda should he prevail in November. (Or at least to not lead the rest of the ballot off an electoral cliff.)

This magazine has never minced words about Joe Biden. We preferred Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in 2020. While we endorsed Biden against Donald Trump—and will probably do so again should that be the choice in November—we’ve been consistently critical of his foreign policy. From China to Ukraine to the Middle East, he’s consistently failed to seize opportunities to end conflicts or promote any overall vision beyond global American belligerence (which we believe is a recipe for the endless wars that drain our resources, grind up our young men and women, and foreclose the changes at home needed to deliver on Democratic platform promises of justice and prosperity). We’ve also regularly urged him to be less deferential to the dead hand of bipartisan convention, and less respectful of what has become a clearly politicized and reactionary Supreme Court.

At the same time, we’ve never hesitated to give the president his due, acknowledging that his domestic appointments have often been surprisingly progressive, while his deft management of the economy deserves our gratitude. Indeed, just last month we noted that “Biden has easily been the most progressive Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.”

That, at least, would be his legacy should he decide to belatedly fulfill his 2020 pledge to serve as “a bridge, not as anything else” to a new “generation of leaders” by stepping aside. Because Biden can still take the win, and retire garlanded with honor and the country’s affection. Should he persist, however, in putting personal pride ahead of patriotism on the increasingly implausible argument that only he can defeat Trump, and then lead his party to defeat in November, that legacy will be destroyed beyond any revision or redemption.

Nor is it only Biden’s reputation that would be at risk. The inner circle of careerists who kept the extent of his frailty from the public until it was too late to challenge him in the primaries should be driven from public life with at least the fervor the party devoted to purging the “McGovernites” who led it to defeat in 1972. Likewise, the centrist politicians and corporate donors who lack the courage to speak out now—very much including Barack Obama, whose thumb on the scales in 2020 (along with a Covid-curtailed campaign season) turned a losing candidate into the party’s anointed nominee. Not to mention the cynical claque of media enablers whose denial and deflection have become a siren’s chorus luring our democracy to political shipwreck.

Make no mistake, it is the liberal and left wings of the party who have long been the adults in the room here. From Sanders’s acceptance in 2020 that his rival Biden might indeed be more likely to defeat Trump, to Ezra Klein’s prescient attempt to raise this issue back in February, to Jeet Heer’s reluctant conclusion last Thursday night that while “Trump was terrible, Biden was worse.” None of them—none of us—expects a change at the top of the ticket to result in an even marginally more progressive candidate; we are all resigned to taking this one for the team, at least as far as ideology is concerned. But anyone who believes, as Biden has long professed, that defeating Trump is both a necessity and in some ways a sufficient aim for this election needs to ask themselves whether a candidate whose principal negative—voters’ reasonable fear that the man they saw in the debate is simply not up to that paramount task—is now irrevocably baked in, is really our last, best hope.