“I hope he makes the difficult and painful decision to step down. I respectfully ask him to do so,” said Lloyd Doggett, the first congressman from the party to publicly ask him to throw in the towel.
“I think it’s a legitimate question to say: Is this an episode or is this a state?” Nancy Pelosi, 84, a former Democratic speaker of the US House of Representatives, told MSNBC.
He is referring to Biden’s disastrous debate last Thursday against Republican Donald Trump, 78, in which the Democrat repeatedly stumbled and lost his thread, exacerbating fears about his mental acuity.
In an attempt to lift spirits, Vice President Kamala Harris said she is “proud” to be the president’s running mate.
“Joe Biden is our candidate. We have defeated Trump once and we are going to defeat him again,” he added.
At a rally with Democratic donors near Washington, Biden offered “an explanation” for the disastrous 90 minutes of debate.
“I almost fell slept”
“It wasn’t very smart” to have “traveled around the world a couple of times (…) just before the debate,” Biden said in an attempt to justify his disastrous performance in the debate. “I almost fell asleep on stage,” he said.
President Biden was in France from June 5 to 9, attending ceremonies marking the Allied landing in Normandy and making a state visit.
On the day of his arrival, June 5, he stayed all day at the hotel.
From June 12 to 14, he traveled to Italy to attend a G7 summit, followed directly by a campaign trip to California.
The Democrat then retired for six days to prepare for the debate with his advisers at the Camp David residence near Washington, a period during which he did not carry out any public activities.
What about the cold?
Until now, the main argument of his supporters had been that Joe Biden had had a “bad night” and was suffering from a “cold.”
The president “knows how to bounce back,” spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, ruling out the possibility of the octogenarian undergoing a cognitive test because “it is not justified, it is not necessary.” In February, his doctor declared him fit to govern.
During the debate, the US president was unable to express himself fluently and forcefully without a teleprompter (a device that allows one to read a text without looking away from the camera). On Friday he will give an interview to ABC News, which will be broadcast in full on Sunday.
The White House is also promising a solo press conference next week during the NATO summit in Washington and talks with senior Democratic officials, governors and congressmen.
Probe
A poll released Tuesday by CNN has further fueled fear in the Democratic camp: 75% of voters surveyed believe that the party would have a better chance in November with another candidate.
Trump has 49% of the votes nationwide, compared to 43% for his rival, a difference that has not changed since the last poll of this type, carried out in April.
Vice President Kamala Harris, though she would not win, would be in a better position, with 45% to the former Republican president’s 47%.
Obvious physical deterioration
The New York Times reported Tuesday that some of the president’s aides have noted “more frequent” and “more pronounced” absences in recent months, but also lucid moments, for example in the face of international crises.
Questions about the mental acuity of the oldest president in US history, who has suffered obvious physical deterioration, are “legitimate,” Karine Jean-Pierre insisted on Tuesday, but she avoided answering them directly.
The spokeswoman said the government was “absolutely not hiding” information about the president’s abilities.
Democrats’ patience is running out.
“We have to be honest with ourselves and say it wasn’t just a horrible night,” Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley told CNN on Tuesday.
Recent articles, notably from Axios and Politico, speak of a president who would only be fully functional between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and who would only read written memos to avoid gaffes.
The White House has so far consistently dismissed questions about Joe Biden’s intellectual acumen.
“Slope”
A recent Wall Street Journal investigation into the octogenarian’s “decline” earned the paper a reprimand from its communications team.
Biden, who has fallen several times in public, has stopped using the long gangplank on his plane for months. He prefers a shorter, more stable ladder.
For several weeks now, he has also surrounded himself with advisers as he travels from the White House to his helicopter on the lawn, which prevents the cameras from recording his very stiff gait.
The gaffe-prone US president has not given a lengthy press conference since January 2022 and has reduced the number of impromptu remarks he makes to reporters.
The Democrat spends most of his weekends at one of his homes in Delaware, with no official schedule.
When Joe Biden recently visited France to commemorate the Allied landings of 1944, he went straight from the airport to his hotel, where he stayed for a whole day, without making any public appearances.
Source: With information from AFP
