Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “ A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
Getting into America’s highest political offices is hard. Getting out is harder.
President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance has intensified calls for him to step aside. Not even 24 hours after his poor showing, The New York Times took the extraordinary and unprecedented position that the sitting president should immediately pass the torch to a more energetic and electable candidate. “The greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform,” the editorial board declared, “is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.”
Regrettably, The Times has it right. After more than a half-century of dedicated and decorated service, the moment has come for Biden to depart the political stage. He must retire. All citizens, regardless of party affiliation, should agree that the challenges our nation faces require political leaders to be at the peak of their game, not when their mental acuity is in obvious decline.
Democrats have been here before. In 2013, faced with the very real possibility that the Republican Party would gain majority control of the Senate, President Barack Obama invited Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to lunch. He claimed that he wanted to build a “better rapport” with the Notorious R.B.G., but most in Obama’s inner circle understood that the president’s objective was to gently nudge her towards retirement. Obama had the foresight to recognize that time was running out on the Democratic Party’s ability to maintain a strong liberal bloc on the Supreme Court. He wanted the chance to appoint a like-minded jurist to the bench. That chance wouldn’t come. Ginsburg flatly turned the president down, saying, “I think [you] would agree with me that [the timing of my retirement] is a question for my own good judgment.”
It turned out to be poor judgment. Ginsburg, generally considered a jurisprudential titan by court watchers on both the left and the right, would remain in her post for seven additional terms. Save the historic 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that constitutionally recognized same-sex marriage, Ginsburg and her liberal allies often found themselves on the losing end of major legal skirmishes. She admitted to considerable frustration. When she died at her home two weeks before the start of the court’s 2021 term, her authority among The Nine had waned.
Ginsburg’s tragic death was the final ingredient in the conservative constitutional revolution. Amy Coney Barrett, Ginsburg’s replacement, might share chromosomes and an elite legal education with the late liberal giant, but little more. She is Ginsburg’s ideological foil. Barrett voted with the majority in overturning Roe v. Wade, defended marriage as a union solely between men and women, and supported men in workplace sexual harassment claims. Indeed, it’s ironic that the passing of the greatest champion of gender equality this nation has ever seen helped to solidify a new judicial patriarchy. The Obama lunch takes on added significance with the clarity of hindsight.
No one should doubt that Joe Biden and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are American patriots. They selflessly gave and gave to their country and to the causes of freedom, equality and justice. They exhibited integrity and decency throughout their long careers. America needs more Joe Bidens and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs. We need more heroes on both sides of the aisle. But we also need our political leaders to know when it’s time to leave.
Ginsburg’s choice to remain on the bench had tragic consequences for her deepest convictions. The same is true if Biden remains in the race. The issues Biden cares most about — civil rights, health care, the working people of America, immigration, abortion, democracy and so on — as well as the degree of dignity the office must engender, are all in jeopardy should he choose to stay the course. And that doesn’t even account for the correlating likelihood that his obstinacy will significantly impact down-ballot races. Biden has an obligation to all Americans to contemplate the considerable stakes at hand. They’ve rarely been higher.
America’s first president, George Washington, confronted similar stakes in similar times. The country was in a bad way in 1796, and Washington was old. He faced a choice: remain in America’s highest office or return to his estate on the Potomac. He chose the latter.
“Friends and Citizens,” his Farewell Address began, “it appears to me proper that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice [to be President] is to be made. I beg you, at the same time, to do me the justice to be assured that this resolution has not been taken without a strict regard to all the considerations appertaining to the relation which binds a dutiful citizen to his country; and that in withdrawing, I am influenced by no diminution of zeal for your future interest, no deficiency of grateful respect for your past kindness, but am supported by a full conviction that the step is compatible with both.”
Take the step, President Biden. Take the step.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.