Joe Biden’s defiance in the face of calls to drop his flagging reelection bid not only threatens to undermine his coalition’s immediate efforts to keep antidemocratic demagogue Donald Trump from regaining power. It could contribute to the very cynicism that has allowed Trumpism to fester and flourish over the last decade.

Throughout his disgraceful, destructive political career, Trump has cast Washington as a swamp, populated by out-of-touch elites whose purported ideals are merely a front for personal ambition. American institutions are not the infrastructure of democracy, in Trump’s telling, but black boxes through which the people really running the country exercise their power, indifferent and unaccountable to the will of the people. These accusations are bad-faith and self-serving, not to mention more appropriately leveled at the party Trump leads, which currently exerts itself mostly through the six unelected partisans it has put on the Supreme Court. But Trump, aided by a GOP that has coalesced around him, has conditioned a significant segment of the American electorate to excuse and more often cheer this political nihilism: In a world where everything is bullshit and everyone is out for themselves, after all, you might as well focus on winning “so much,” as Trump memorably put it in 2016, that “you may even get tired of winning.”

Biden ran in 2020 not just against Trump but against the disillusionment he and his movement feed on. The country was coming off a term of endless chaos and corruption, and was still in the throes of a pandemic that laid bare the limits of Trump’s zero-sum politics. In what he described as a “winter of peril and possibility,” Biden vowed in his inauguration speech to “restore the soul and secure the future of America” by marshaling the power and wisdom of the institutions Trump sought to destroy. “America has to be better than this,” he said as he assumed the presidency. “It is a time for boldness, for there is so much to do.”

Biden fulfilled many of the promises he made in that address. But he has not been able exorcize the MAGA movement from our politics, and it is threatening now to come back even stronger: The right-wing has set out its Project 2025 wishlist, and Trump—who holds a commanding lead in polls—appears ready to make that Christian nationalist nightmare, as well as his own personal “retribution” fantasies, a reality. Worse yet, where Biden once met the moment, he now seems to be shrinking from it: dismissing unfavorable polls and media coverage as fake or biased; misrepresenting legitimate skepticism of his candidacy as “elite” backstabbing; and substituting that “boldness” of vision with something more like “save your breath and get on board,” as David Axelrod summed it up the other day. “It’s me or Trump.”

That choice is stark, even after last month’s debate raised serious questions about Biden’s age and acuity: His reelection would at the very least keep democracy on life support, while Trump’s would mean a return to the chaos and then some. Still, it’s one thing to ask that people hold their nose as they vote; it’s another to ask them to cover their eyes and ears—and that’s what Biden and his allies are doing right now, to the peril of the nation in November and beyond.

None of this is to suggest an equivalence between Biden and Trump or the parties they lead. Trump is a grave danger to the country, and defeating him is, as Biden put it in a letter Monday, the “one job” they have before them in November. But that effort is being seriously undermined by the votive-candle politics that has taken hold in some corners of the Democratic party, which sometimes seems to be arguing not just that Biden remains the most likely candidate to defeat Trump, but that there is nothing at all to worry about except for the “elites” persecuting him over a single bad debate.

Of course, if anything, the elites have been late to the game on this: For months, voters have been saying in polls that they regard Biden as too old to run again and that they would prefer him to make way for someone else. Yes, Democrats overwhelmingly checked Biden’s name on primary ballots this year, as he and his surrogates have been eager to point out. But there was no serious primary to speak of, and no real stress test of his candidacy to reveal the weaknesses that were laid bare on the debate stage with Trump. After that dismal performance, a CNN poll found that three-quarters of voters felt Democrats would have a better shot at winning with a candidate other than Biden at the top of the ticket—and they’re probably right, based on subsequent survey results. He trails his predecessor in national polls, and is deeper underwater in the swing states he needs to retain the presidency. In Wisconsin, for instance, Biden is behind five points in a new poll—even though Senator Tammy Baldwin, the incumbent Democrat in the state, enjoys a decisive lead over her Republican opponent in the survey.

People seem to want to vote for Democrats, whose policies on abortion and a range of other issues are broadly popular with the public. They just seem less than enthusiastic about voting for Biden, to the point where Vice President Kamala Harris and even Hillary Clinton—whose failed, overconfident 2016 campaign gave us Trump in the first place—are both polling better than the current party leader and his opponent.

“The notion that the presidential is a Toss Up was a stretch even before the debate,” as the elections analyst Dave Wasserman noted Tuesday. “Today, Trump has a clear advantage over Biden and a much more plausible path to 270 Electoral votes.” On Tuesday, Cook Political Report moved its ratings in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada—all of which Biden won in 2020—from toss-ups to “lean Republican,” and regards firmer Democratic territory like New Hampshire and Minnesota as being in play for Trump.

But Biden says he’s not buying it: “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up,” he insisted to George Stephanopoulos in a primetime ABC News interview last week. When Jen Psaki, his former press secretary, later said that her old boss seemed in that sit-down to be “a little bit in denial about the state of the race,” and continued Monday to raise concerns about the viability of his candidacy, she was met with some scorn from Resistance types online—and eye-rolls from some Democratic defenders. “It’s not really helpful,” Senator John Fetterman told Psaki of the ongoing coverage of Biden’s debate performance, likening those questioning the president to Monday morning quarterbacks giving advice to Tom Brady. “There’s only one…person in America that’s beat Trump in an election, and my money is gonna be on the guy who kicked his ass in 2020.”

This kind of swagger doesn’t ring true, though—partly because this has never been about just one debate, and partly because it doesn’t comport with what many Democrats are saying in private. “The morale of the caucus is at historic lows,” as one member told Semafor’s Kadia Goba. To compare it to that of a funeral, the member said, “is an insult to funerals.” Colorado Senator Michael Bennett confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that he told Democratic colleagues Biden was on track to lose the election in a “landslide” and to take House and Senate Democrats down with him, a fear that was reportedly echoed by red-state Democrats Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana. A handful of other Democrats have publicly called on Biden to drop out, and even Nancy Pelosi subtly suggested Wednesday that he may want to reconsider staying in the race. But Biden doesn’t seem to be listening to them, instead leaning on members of his inner circle like First Lady Jill Biden and his son, Hunter, leading many Democrats to simply throw up their hands: “I wish I was more brave,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair told NBC News, worrying that they would be “crucified” by leadership if they were to call for Biden to pass the torch.

That some Democrats appear more afraid of running afoul of their party leader than of allowing Trump to return to the White House undermines their legitimate warnings of the existential danger the GOP standard-bearer poses to democracy. They also play into GOP talking points that Democrats are alarmists seeking to scare Americans into voting for them. “It’s just words,” Trump said last month. “It’s like their slogan.”

It’s obviously not just empty words—but how much credibility will Democrats have to convince people otherwise if they keep chipping away at it? And for what? So that, in the best case scenario, a man who sought election as a transitional candidate can serve in office until he’s 86? That’s hardly an inspiring message to voters, particularly younger ones, for whom the kind of optimism inspired by Barack Obama or even the steady know-how of a younger Biden is pretty foreign.

The debates Obama and Biden had with their Republican challengers in 2008 and 2012 seem now to have happened on another planet, and to revisit them in 2024 is to be reminded of how much our standards have diminished during the Trump era. These days, Democrats simply seem to want credit for not being Donald Trump. “I know how to tell the truth,” Biden said in North Carolina, the day after the debate. “I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job.”

In another time, such attributes would be the absolute baseline for someone seeking the presidency—not what they present as one of their main qualifications. That we’ve gotten to this point is more a reflection of our sorry political moment than of Biden, who has previously proven capable of clearing a much higher bar than being a better person than the former host of the Apprentice. But he and his defenders aren’t helping us get out of our present predicament by demanding voters pretend that they’re imagining things when they watch Joe Biden’s stumbles, that they should be impressed and maybe even inspired by his ability to hold a campaign rally, and that it is “ageism and ableism” to expect the most powerful person in the world to offer serious responses to legitimate questions about his health.

To simply wish those questions away and demand loyalty, as Biden and his allies have done, is counterproductive—first, to the pressing cause of defeating Trump, and, more broadly, to Biden’s grander project of restoring faith in the institutions his predecessor sought to erode. He has often been an admirable caretaker of those institutions. But the most convincing argument he can now make in their favor is a willingness to hand over the keys.