Democrats are freaking out about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for “a strategic pause” on President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan. “For the first time, Biden is staring at the plausible vision of a failed presidency,” laments New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.

But Manchin is not trying to bring Biden down. As Chait points out earlier in his piece, shortly after Biden’s inauguration, Manchin promised, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.”