In 2024 terms, this was the good Joe Biden: Discussing the minutiae of foreign policy at his Thursday night press conference, the president sounded confident and in command of the facts, delivering answers about U.S. policy toward Russia and China that his Republican rival would not be able to give even after a heroic dose of stimulants and gray-market brain pills. He noted the contrast himself.
“Where’s Trump been?” he asked at one point, pushing back on criticism over his limited unscripted appearances. “Riding around on his golf cart? Filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball?"
There were flubs — referring to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump” (after earlier calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy “President Putin”) — but these were more Vintage Joe/Old Guy gaffes than “25th Amendment” territory. If one were already a supporter of Biden staying in the race, the performance was likely enough to rebut fears that the president’s excruciating debate performance reflected a “condition,” as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, rather than a one-off “bad night.”
But if this was the presumptive Democratic nominee at his best, after what his campaign chair described as some “very, very, very hard weeks,” is that good enough? He performed admirably for an 81-year-old man named Joe Biden, but if he were able to do so regularly — meet his own contemporary standard of “good enough” — this likely would not have been his first solo press conference since last year.
Since the debate — worth rewatching, for masochists or others doubting, with the passage of time, that it was not just bad but extremely concerning — he took part in an interview with ABC News that led the host of the program to conclude he was not fit to serve until January 2029. Two scripted interviews with friendly radio programs resulted in controversy: One interviewer admitted to editing Biden’s remarks at the request of his campaign while the other was fired after admitting that the president’s PR team fed them all the questions.
Biden was cogent when talking foreign policy, but that’s not to say there weren’t also moments of dubious coherence at the press conference, coupled with the wounded pride of a man who rightly believes he should receive more credit for presiding over the strongest economy in the developed world.
Asked why he had decided not to pass the baton to a younger generation, Biden told reporters that it was a product of his realizing “the gravity of the situation I inherited”: an economy still recovering from a pandemic-induced recession and a democracy threatened by a MAGAfied GOP. He had still managed to pass major legislation, Biden said, thanks to the decades of experience he had in the Senate, arguing he was uniquely equipped — perhaps the only one equipped — to do the job of being president.
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There are other Democrats who could beat Trump, Biden conceded, but he wouldn’t drop out if shown data that they would have a better chance than him; he’d only quit if his team ran the numbers and “came back and said there’s no way you can win,” he said.
“I want to finish it, and get that finished,” he said. “Tomorrow, if we had a circumstance where we had a lineup, and I didn’t have to inherit what I did, we just moved things along — anyway, it’s going to change.”
To be frank, that does not make sense and, when parsed for meaning, it does not reflect well on the president’s judgment. Democratic insiders believe Biden is dragging down Democrats everywhere, a fact he acknowledged when he said he understands why lawmakers in tough races are distancing themselves from his campaign. Democrats are currently on track to lose the presidency, the Senate and the House — this after months of reassurances that the Biden campaign, which is under-performing Democratic congressional candidates, would turn things around at the June 27 debate — meaning that, on the current trajectory, there will be no President Biden in 2025 or a Democratic majority he can work with in Congress.
For critics of Biden’s decision to stay in the race, it’s not about any one performance, but that overall trajectory — not just in terms of polling and the November election, but the president’s mental acuity. Biden may grind out a win now and then, capable of delivering a performance that is acceptable every couple weeks, but “one bad night” is simply not true: His awful, alarming and genuinely heart-breaking debate persona has repeatedly turned up elsewhere, his own campaign staff and a senior White House official telling reporters he should not be in the race.
His staying in the race forces Democrats to tell voters what they believe to be a lie, based on the available evidence: That Biden can keep doing this for another 4 ½ years.
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“The fact is we can’t have a situation where every day we are holding our breath, whether it’s a press conference or a rally,” Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., told The New York Times on Thursday, joining more than a dozen other elected Democrats in explicitly calling for Biden to step aside.
That’s a sentiment widely shared among Democrats: Which version of the president is going to show up and can we really tell voters to ignore the version that looks lost and sounds confused?
“One of the really kind of sick aspects of this moment is that we are watching every speech, every rally, every debate, and saying: How did he do today? And that’s just not the way to think about the presidency of the United States,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Ct., said on MSNBC following Biden’s press conference. The ranking member on the House intelligence committee, Himes praised Biden’s Thursday night performance — “foreign policy is his strength” — but argued that nothing would be good enough to assuage concerns that have already been raised about the president’s visible decline.
No one doubts that Biden can still have a good night; the problem is he has already shown himself capable of also having the worst night of any president who has ever been on television. That affirmed voters’ gravest concern about Biden’s candidacy. Himes said it’s also why the president needs to step aside and trust that the job of defending democracy is not his alone.
“If you don’t look at this in a cold, hard way,” Himes argued, “you will be complicit in Donald Trump’s second presidency.”
Behind the scenes, that’s an argument reportedly shared by Pelosi and former President Barack Obama, both of whom have spent the past two weeks noticeably refraining from full-throated endorsements of the incumbent and his desire to keep going. CBS News reports that potentially dozens of House Democrats are also prepared to go public with a call for Biden to step down; watching the president refer to Harris by the name of his Republican opponent was, for one House Democrat, a moment that had his colleagues declaring “this is over.”
It’s not over, though, until one man decides it is.
Speaking Thursday, the president said delegates at next month’s Democratic convention should feel free to “do whatever they want.” If they take that to mean listening to the polls showing most of the party’s voters now want a different candidate, then that could make for the last thing any elected Democrat wants: weeks more uncertainty and a messy four days in Chicago.
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