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Biden Rejects the Drug of Power

Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the presidential race reflects a humility that is far more likely to be found among democratic leaders than authoritarians. But as Donald Trump has shown – with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his vow to be a dictator “on day one” – such humility is never guaranteed.

NEW YORK – “We cling to power as a flea clings to a collar,” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, declared in 1957. To make his point, he asked his audience of shocked Communist Party apparatchiks what the average retirement age was. “Mid-sixties,” someone replied. The 63-year-old Khrushchev joked that he was getting up there and wanted to sip tea peacefully as a pensioner, not to head straight from the Kremlin to the grave. US President Joe Biden apparently got the memo.

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