Aaron Sorkin is taking back his suggestion that the Democratic party nominate Mitt Romney as its 2024 presidential candidate, expressed in a New York Times op-ed that was published online Sunday.
After Sorkin’s piece dropped, President Joe Biden announced that he was ending his 2024 re-election bid and would be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Later, Sorkin’s West Wing actor Josh Malina posted what looked like a screenshot of a message from the writer.
“I need to borrow your Twitter account again,” Sorkin’s note began before he offered a suggested tweet: “I take it all back. Harris for America!”
A rep for Sorkin confirmed the accuracy of his note and the Times piece was updated with a note about Biden dropping out of the 2024 race.
In his op-ed Sorkin, the Oscar-winning scribe of The Social Network who also penned the 1995 political film The American President, pointed out the similarities between West Wing’s fictitious President Bartlet and the real-life political landscape this year, including an attempted shooting of a character and a president contending with a serious illness.
Like Biden, Sorkin wrote, Bartlet also faced the question of whether or not to run for re-election. The screenwriter noted that his character triumphantly decided to run, and says in a third season opener, “I’m going to win.”
But, Sorkin noted, “because I needed the West Wing audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I didn’t really dramatize any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I didn’t dramatize any danger posed by Bartlet’s opponent winning.”
Sorkin added that “if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent” — and if that opponent was “a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions” who “had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people” and “was a hero to white supremacists” — Bartlet would have dropped out of the race.
“The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden,” Sorkin continued. “And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.”
His solution? “The Democratic Party should pick a Republican,” he wrote. “At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.”
Sorkin argued that the pick “would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice.”
He added that the choice “would be putting our money where our mouth is: a clear and powerful demonstration that this election isn’t about what our elections are usually about it, but about stopping a deranged man from taking power.”
To conclude, he emphasized: “But mostly, [the move to elect Romney] would be the end of Donald Trump in presidential politics.”
3:24 p.m. This story has been updated with Sorkin taking back his Romney idea and endorsing Harris.
This story was originally published on July 21 at 9:25 a.m.