in him First interview Since last week’s disastrous debate, Joe Biden has appeared too weak to defeat Donald Trump and too confused to finish his campaign.
Far from easing concerns about his candidacy, the president’s meeting with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos should further alarm Democratic leaders. Biden’s comments indicate that his party is headed for a worst-case scenario, one where the president is largely incompetent as a campaigner but not so consistently and blatantly incompetent that his inability to win re-election becomes undeniable, even to himself.
As ill and confused as Biden seemed in last week’s debate, it will be easy to convince him to drop out — or at least, for Democrats to unite behind a concerted push for his exit. If the president had turned a decade younger in the past eight days, he might have salvaged his campaign. Instead, he did better, but still terrible. Which means that to save the possibility of the Democratic Party, his Congress leadership will need a wise and daring display. It is not clear that one is in the offing.
The president’s goal in Friday’s interview was clear: to establish that all the troubling features of his debate performance — the incoherence, shaky voice and blank facial expression — were all caused by coldness and poor preparation rather than symptoms. cognitive decline. Perhaps there was no reasonable way to make this case. (While the interview aired, The Washington Post, The New York TimesAnd NBC News (All published stories indicate that Biden has repeatedly suffered the same kind of delusion behind closed doors in recent months.) Biden’s attempt to sell the idea that his debate performance was a complete inconsistency in self-parody.
Stephanopoulos asked Biden if he went back and watched the debate after it happened. The president replied with a strange uncertainty, “I don’t think I did, no.” The ABC anchor asked if he knew how badly the debate was going right now.
Biden then tried to make the White House’s initial point about the debate: that he was preparing for it as if it were a meeting with a foreign leader, digging deep into complex policy details, which only served to distract him from his communications. Big-picture lawsuits to the American people. But the President lost his possession on this thought before it was completed, and then at two completely different talking points (that his polling was not so bad, that Trump confused him with a lies), which he failed to express both of which he failed.
I prepared the whole way, no one’s fault, mine. It’s all my fault. I, uh — I usually sat down and prepared what I would do as soon as I came back for briefings with foreign leaders or the National Security Council. And I realized — part way through, you know, all — I got the quote that the New York Times had put me down on 10 points of controversy, now nine, or whatever. The thing is, what I saw was that he also lied 28 times. I couldn’t—I mean, that’s not the way the debate went—my fault, other’s fault, no other’s fault.
As the interview went on, Biden became more coherent, but he also became more detached from reality. The president has denied the validity of all unfavorable poll results, including surveys showing Trump His national leadership expanded Since the debate during Biden Approval ratings slide to an all-time low.
Most worryingly for Democrats, Biden suggested that no amount of information could possibly undermine his belief that he is his party’s best hope to defeat Trump. At this point, that idea lacks all credibility. Biden has long trailed his Republican rival nationally and in every major swing state. More than that in a recent survey 70 percent The public considered him too old to serve. Countless Democrats have now gone on the record saying he won’t run for president and/or that their interactions with him have scared them for their cognitive well-being.
No interview or stump speech cannot erase these manifestations. News media will not stop verifying a lot of evidence of old age. The Trump campaign won’t forget that it now has a trove of derogatory clips of Biden’s brain and devastating quotes from the president’s allies. Given this climate and the candidate’s limitations, it’s not credible that Biden can surge in the polls between now and November.
Yet the president appeared ready to write all of this off.
“I remember them saying the same thing to me in 2020,” Biden said. “‘I can’t win, the polls show I can’t win.’ Remember ‘Red Wave’? Before the vote I said, ‘That won’t happen. We are going to win.’ We did better in the off -yar than almost any current president. “
Here, Biden was referring to predictions that the Republican Party would win a landslide in the 2022 midterm elections. And it’s true that Democrats fared better than expected, dominating many of the most hotly contested races of the year. But the 2022 election It was pretty accurate even by historical standards, and Republicans won both the national popular vote and control of the House of Representatives. Still, Biden argued to ABC News that the polling isn’t as accurate as it used to be.
Unwilling to reconsider his candidacy, Biden also proved averse to empirically proving his mental health, refusing to submit to cognitive and neurological tests and then promise to share the results with the public.
Finally, President Trumpian ended the interview with self-flattery, which served as an implicit rebuke of his vice president’s readiness to handle foreign affairs. “Who can hold NATO together like me?” he asked rhetorically. “Who’s going to be able to be in a position where I’m able to put the Pacific basin in a position where we’re — we’re at least checkmating China now? Who’s going to — who’s going to do that? Who’s got the reach?”
The Biden who spoke to ABC News on Friday night was vulnerable, inarticulate, arrogant and antisocial. He was a man who appeared both ready and willing to lead his team into the wilderness. If he was running and the question of how he would feel Trump, Biden replied, “I will feel that I have done all my things and I have done the best thing I know I know, that’s what this is about. “
This is not the president’s best self.
What’s being asked of Biden at this point is no small thing: to lose enormous personal power in order to give his team the best shot at keeping an authoritarian reactionary out of office. Many leaders will not be able to call on the humility and self -esteem needed to do this. I still hope that the President’s promise to the liberal democracy and the Democratic Party is sincerely and he can find the way to such heroic self-knowledge and sacrifice.
After Friday night, however, it was clear he needed trusted friends in the Democratic leadership to guide him.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner interviews Biden before the campaign was trying Rallying his colleagues to force Biden out of the race. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, designed Sunday to discuss Biden’s candidacy with top Democrats in his chamber. If blue America’s congressional leaders join the Democratic Party donors And Backbencher In urging Biden to step down, the president will likely accede to their demands. If only they followed the lead of the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn And pretend that Biden’s performance has settled all the questions about his fitness to nominate Biden on Friday night, then they will probably condemn America the second Trump President.
