When the bullet pierced Donald Trump’s ear on Saturday evening, Democrats in Washington sent up a collective cry to the heavens. After two weeks of savaging each other and their own candidate, Joe Biden, for bombing at the Atlanta debate, Trump had just been made into a living martyr—with iconic photos to boot. If it looked like he had been on the glide path to victory before Saturday, the shooter seemed to have made the election all but a formality. “It’s the worst thing that could have possibly happened,” a senior source in the Biden campaign told me on Saturday night. 

And yet, all of this near tragedy may have been great news for Biden himself, politically speaking. Going into the weekend, all the talk in Washington had been about how the 81-year-old president simply had to step aside for the sake of the republic. Two Democratic members of Congress I spoke to were sure that Biden wasn’t seeing the polls they were, and that Biden’s closest advisors—Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, et al.—were protecting him from an overdue appointment with reality.