Joe Biden needs to realize that the election isn’t just about him.

The distressing truth about Joe Biden isn’t just that he’s visibly aged as president, but also that, as he fends off calls to give up being the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, some of his worst personality traits have come to the fore.

In his successful campaign for president in 2020, Biden displayed a winning modesty that helped secure his role as a consensus candidate who could hold together an often rambunctious Democratic Party coalition. Speaking at a rally in March 2020, Biden addressed a crowd while three potential vice-presidential running mates stood behind him (then-Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer). Biden said, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” Two months later Biden at a fundraiser said, “I view myself as a transition candidate.”

Yet in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on July 5 on ABC News, Biden discarded the modesty of portraying himself as part of a larger political movement. Instead, he took on the messianic and megalomaniacal pride of a Trumpian political celebrity who believes everything is about himself.

At one point, Biden said, “I’m running the world.” He acknowledged that this “sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.” In other words, the United States is the essential nation (something that billions around the world might dispute) and Joe Biden is the essential man (something that no leader in a democracy should ever believe about themselves).

It’s notable that Biden nowhere mentioned Harris in the Stephanopoulos interview. He no longer sees himself as a “bridge” or “transition figure” to the future but rather as the irreplaceable leader who will oversee an inflection point.

Biden is framing the election in purely egotistical terms, throwing down the gauntlet to his critics in the party, daring them to come after him. In the past, I’ve described this as the Samson Option, whereby Donald Trump threatens to destroy the Republican Party if they don’t give him what he wants. Implicit in Biden’s self-centered interview was the danger that Biden, like Samson before him, would rather bring down the temple around him rather than submit. Samson was a biblical hero, but this type of destructive martyrdom is at odds with democracy, which is always a project of collective action, not ego satisfaction.

At one point when Biden called in to Morning Joe on MSNBC, he said, “I’m getting frustrated by the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more.’ Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president, challenge me at the convention.”

You can hear Biden playing a dangerous game of chicken with elected officials in his own party: either they give up or he’ll crash right into them. This is the Samson Option – with a twist. Biden is willing to bring down the temple of his own party, becoming not a heroic martyr but an epic villain of pure selfishness.

JEET HEER is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, where this story first appeared.