Joe Biden has had a great presidency. By any objective metric, he has excelled as president. One of his top aides, who worked closely with him in the Obama White House, said to me last year, “I had no idea when he was vice president that he would be so effective as president. He has exceeded my expectations in every way.”

Now Biden has an opportunity to produce the perfect capstone for his presidency, an act of wisdom and leadership that will seal his legacy as being among the best of this country’s chief executives. He can pass the torch to a new generation of leaders. He can look to his effective and talented vice president and say, “It is your turn now.” He can work with other party leaders, including ex-presidents Obama and Clinton, to ensure her victory.

By far the most undeniable message of the debate that took place on the evening of June 27 between Biden and former President Donald Trump was that neither America nor the world can risk a Trump victory. Trump, already established as having the worst record of any president in U.S. history, as a convicted criminal, a fraud, a rapist, and a traitor, must not win in November.

On Thursday night, Trump made it clear that if he’s reelected we could expect even worse than we got the last time around. We understand the patterns of his lies because lies are all he ever offers, and during this debate he unleashed an endless stream of them. But when the lie is that we have to stop post-birth abortions (which are not even a thing) and leave the choice about the future of abortion to the states, we know that means that neither he nor the MAGA GOP will stop at gutting Roe v. Wade. When he equivocates about whether he will accept election results in November or dodges questions about whether he will weaponize the justice system to attack his enemies and then offers an absurd list of Biden “crimes,” we know a Trump win will usher in a police state in America. When he promises to end the Ukraine war even before he is sworn in and then adds the outrageous assertion that........

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