Saturday night, President Joe Biden was still planning to stay in the 2024 presidential race. Sunday afternoon, he shocked many of his senior staff by telling them he was withdrawing just before making the decision public, sources familiar with the matter said.

“Last night the message was proceed with everything, full speed ahead,” one of the sources told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. “At around 1:45 p.m. today the president told his senior team that he had changed his mind.”

A few minutes later, Biden made his bombshell announcement.

The decision came less than a month after Biden had a disastrous debate against Republican Donald Trump that raised questions about the mental acuity of the 81-year-old Democratic president.

Biden came to his decision over the 48 hours preceding the announcement, after digesting large amounts of data and polls that showed his path to victory largely out of reach, two sources said. He agonized over the decision, but when he made up his mind, he moved quickly, a senior White House official said.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke multiple times on Sunday ahead of his announcement, a person familiar with their conversations said.

Biden, who has been at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home since testing positive for COVID on Wednesday, gathered his senior White House and campaign team on a virtual call shortly before 1:45 p.m. Sunday, not long before his announcement went out, and shared his decision by reading the letter he would soon release.

“He read the letter to us and wanted us to understand his thinking. He said he had wrestled with it over the last 48 hours,” the official said.

Shortly after the call, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients called senior White House staff together to inform them of the decision.

“This was really closely held,” the official said. “It came as a surprise to most White House folks.”

DIVIDED PARTY

After the debate, Biden began losing ground to Trump in battleground states, and Biden’s campaign was pursuing a razor-thin path to reelection.

“It became hard with the growing opposition within the party. We have to be united going into November. That was a factor,” the senior White House official said, while noting that there had still been significant support for Biden across the country.

“I’m still processing it,” said Marcus Mason, an at-large member of the Democratic National Convention.

“The president will go down in history as a patriot who put his country and party over his own ambitions,” Mason said.

The president, still nursing a cough after his COVID diagnosis, had spent the weekend stewing over Democratic pressure to force him to leave the race, aides said. With him were long-time senior aides Annie Tomasini and Steve Richetti.

Biden had been particularly irked at former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom Biden advisers believed was orchestrating a pressure campaign to get him to stand down.

Hours before the shock announcement, the Biden campaign denied reports that he was planning to drop out.

“It is false. And I think that it is false to continue to try to gin up this narrative,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told MSNBC’s “The Weekend” on Sunday morning.

There were plenty of signs Biden had been thinking about pulling out for several days, with sources saying that the Democratic incumbent had been doing some soul-searching.

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