Behind the scenes/ His political 'friends' were abandoning him, the lonely 48 hours that brought Joe Biden's resignation

On Friday morning, the message that came out of Joe Biden's camp left no room for interpretation.

He might be sick with Covid, but he was determined: The re-election must go ahead.

"He's not going anywhere," Biden campaign chairman Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," a program the president watches so enthusiastically that it has become the daily gauge of the Biden campaign. .

Then Biden himself came out with a statement clearly intended to silence the doubters.

"I look forward to being back on the campaign trail next week to expose the threat of Donald Trump's Project 2025 agenda," he said, referring to the far-right plan produced by Trump associates for a second term. Great America (Maga).

When news broke later that afternoon that the Biden campaign had planned a visit to the Austin, Texas, Lyndon Johnson presidential library on Wednesday, it seemed like he really meant it.

Biden, 81, was moving forward.

The problem was, the doubters wouldn't shut up. As Friday slipped into Saturday, the noise emanating from them was changing from whispers to a cacophony.

Just on Friday, at least 10 Democrats in Congress joined those who had publicly called for Biden to step down, arguing that it was in the best interest of the party and the country given the threat to democracy that Trump poses.

Prominent figures in the party such as Sen. Sherrod Brown, himself in a tough re-election race in Ohio, called on Biden to end his campaign.

Sending a message that wouldn't have been lost on Biden and his team, top California lawmakers close to Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker of the House, joined the chorus. Adding her name to Adam Schiff's, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren bluntly told Biden that his candidacy was "on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially affect crucial House and Senate races for voted. It is for these reasons that I urge you to leave."

There were 40 members of Congress, and the stamp of Pelosi and other key Democrats who had pushed Biden out was beginning to emerge.

As Biden continued to seclude himself at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with first lady Jill Biden only able to support him from another separate room, the president could sit and think long and hard about many of to his supposed political friends who were abandoning him.

According to the New York Times, he was bitter about Pelosi's role as the person he accused of being the main instigator of a campaign to oust him.

Barack Obama, with whom Biden has had a rocky relationship since Obama pushed his former vice president to stand aside for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, was also subject to Biden's growing frustrations, the newspaper reported.

Locked up inside the walls, Trump on the other hand was enjoying his misery.

On Saturday, Trump turned to his favorite pastime to put his hand on his rival's wound.

He was very happy to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump said at a Maga rally — because it was so much more fun than sitting "on a boring beach watching the waves roll in." But he said even more.

"Right now, the Democratic Party bosses are frantically trying to overturn the results of their party's primaries to get Joe Biden off the ballot," Trump said.

For once, he told the truth.

Not that Biden's own campaign team knew any better. Times reporter Kenneth Vogel revealed at X that 30 minutes before the historic announcement was made, Biden's re-election staff was busily calling delegates, urging them to support his dashed hopes by publicly declaring support for him.

We don't know exactly when he made the decision, but it seems that by late Saturday, Biden had finally come to the conclusion that he had no choice but to repeat the words that so many Democrats had told him during these extremely painful days. "I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country that I retire"

He called two of his closest advisers, Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, to the vacation home and together they "belatedly" wrote the notice letter, according to the New York Times. Members of the president's family and some close aides were told the end was coming Saturday, but most campaign staffers were told literally just 60 seconds before the news broke.

It may be some time before we understand the full emotional depths to which Biden had to delve to write that anguished letter. As he said in that letter, the presidency had been the "greatest honor" of his life, and now he was saying goodbye.

The 48 hours were already over. A new era is beginning.