Over the past year, we’ve had multiple pundits and editorial boards call for Biden to withdraw from the presidential race because of bad polling numbers and his age. Meanwhile, Trump, who himself is no spring chicken, was recently convicted of 34 felonies, and so far pundits and editorial boards are silent.

Actually, silent isn’t entirely fair–Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher did call for this, though it’s notable that he’s one of the very few (boldface mine):

The Biden-Harris campaign’s communication director issued a statement (perhaps written in anticipation of a hung jury) that didn’t challenge that point: “Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”

The rest of us need not accept this assumption. If the Republican Party had any sense of decency and self-respect, they wouldn’t either. For the good of the country, Donald Trump should drop out the 2024 presidential race.

A president should be of decent character. A president should be entrusted to faithfully execute the law. The trial made clear that Trump is not of decent character and has no fealty to the law. He is a man who had an extramarital affair while his wife was pregnant. He is a man who used a tabloid newspaper to falsely smear his rivals, skirting campaign contribution laws. He is a man who didn’t think twice about falsifying records to cover up his transgressions.

Quibbling about the severity of the crime—falsifying business records in the first degree is not as grave as conspiracy to defraud the United States, to mention just one of Trump’s outstanding indictments—obscures the fact that Trump committed a crime, and did so in a self-serving pursuit of political power….

Trump still has the opportunity to commit an uncharacteristically decent act and spare America from having a felon on the ballot. To refuse to step aside–in favor of someone who shares his policy positions but not his criminal record–would further reveal Trump is far more interested in his personal ambitions than his policy positions…

For months, our media was saturated with calls from bored pundits and anxious Democrats for President Joe Biden to drop out of the race–not because of any violations of law or deficiencies of character, but because he’s old and slightly behind in most polls. The grounds justifying a Trump withdrawal are a bit more firm.

Since Trump is so shameless and so many Republicans are terrified of Trump’s rabid followers, I do not expect months of similar commentary calling for Trump to drop out. But I hope my expectations are wrong.

Admittedly, textbook narcissist won’t do anything for the good of the country, but pressure should be brought to bear on all of the institutions that spent months saying Biden should withdraw. It’s all the more critical that this happen, since half of independents, and fifteen percent of Republicans think he should withdraw.

(here’s another exception, though I think the argument is poor, in that Trump likely won’t be in jail ever, and, if he were placed under house arrest, it probably wouldn’t be for that long)

Of course, it doesn’t help when some Democrats, like Rep. Dean Phillips, argue that NY Gov. Hochul should “pardon Trump for the good of the country.”

As it always is, it will be up to Democratic supporters to save professional Democrats from their own incompetency.