CNN
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Joe Biden’s refusal to step down thwarted an effort on Tuesday to remove him from the Democratic nomination.
But his dismal performance in the presidential debate and his defiant post-debate attitude have severely weakened his standing in a party already unenthusiastic about his campaign. His terrible two weeks, coupled with his sudden re-emergence in the campaign against a revitalized former President Donald Trump who held a ferocious rally in Florida nine days before accepting the Republican nomination, threaten to further narrow his already precarious reelection path.
In Washington on Tuesday, deep anxiety about the president’s future hung over Democratic senators and representatives, who vented their frustrations behind closed doors on either end of the Capitol.
But no votes emerged that seriously threatened Biden’s ability to retain the nomination, and Republican leaders in the House and Senate voiced clear, if less than enthusiastic, support for the president. In the end, Biden’s warning in a letter to lawmakers on Monday that “I am determined to remain in the race” and his acknowledgement that primary voters had made their voices heard left critics with little room to maneuver.
But Biden faces a new test on Thursday when he holds a solo news conference after the NATO summit. Any gaffe or confusion could destroy the fragile wall he has erected around the dam of Democratic support.
With less than four months to go until Election Day, the spectacle of the party debating the viability, competence and mental strength of its candidate is emblematic of the crisis plaguing the presidential campaign. There is little evidence so far that Biden is ready to commit to the saturation level of town hall meetings, campaigning and media onslaughts that many Democrats, including those who believe he should remain in the race, are calling for. Some Democrats see Biden as unlikely to win the November election. And for all of them, the atmosphere is an existential one, because Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has rarely taken such a strong political stance since entering the presidential race.
Tuesday was expected to be a big day for Biden as lawmakers gathered together for the first time since the debate late last month and the subsequent July 4 recess. But the president has managed to defuse the post-debate crisis so far this week, despite a growing number of lawmakers calling for him to step down.
“We want to turn the page. We want to get past this,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters — but with the political fate of Biden, the oldest president in history, hanging in the balance, that may be an impossible aspiration.
Yet despite the effects of aging evident in his language and movements, Biden delivered some of his strongest public remarks in recent memory while welcoming world leaders to a NATO summit in Washington on Tuesday. “Remember, the greatest cost and the greatest risk is a Russian victory in Ukraine. We cannot allow that to happen,” he said, praising “the single largest and most effective defense alliance in the history of the world.”
Biden’s bold remarks were a reminder that the summit should have been focused on showcasing his leadership as one of the Western world’s most important leaders since World War II and drawing a contrast with Trump, who spent his first year in office blasting America’s European allies. But the event turned into a test of the president’s acumen.
A White House official told CNN’s Kayla Touche that Tuesday’s speech will go ahead as scheduled and that staff hope Biden can return to “business as usual.” But that’s unlikely, since all of the president’s public events have become excruciating all-nighters where everyone must brace for gaffes, awkward moments and freezes. And every time he steps in front of the cameras, it’s refracted through the prism of his debate performances, which burned Biden’s ignoble image of struggling into the minds of 50 million viewers. It’s a low bar for a president to get through a short, scripted speech at a summit without disaster using a teleprompter. And Biden’s often glacial pace in public stands in sharp contrast to his former, playful, forceful persona.
This situation is unlikely to change over the next four months because the conflict is endemic, coupled with the president’s decision to run for a new term that ends at age 86.
Still, it’s too early to write Biden off. It’s the voters who decide the election, not the critical legislators or the scathing media commentary. The president has repeatedly defied predictions of his political demise and found inner strength in a life marred by personal tragedy and political disappointment. And as the first former president to be convicted, Trump has an uncanny ability to alienate moderates, suburbanites and swing voters with his extreme rhetoric and threats to his opponents. The former president will return to the stage next week at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which is shaping up to be a MAGA fest. Biden’s campaign sees this as an opportunity to reinforce the contrast with Trump that has been erased by the nightmare of the past two weeks of presidential debates.
Most national polls after the debate suggest Biden lost to Trump by at least a few points in a race that was contested within the margin of error. So far, there have been few quality polls in battleground states about how things are going after the debate. But Biden was widely seen as lagging behind Trump in many of the battleground states that would determine the outcome of the election before the debate, and he needed to use it to reset his standoff with Trump. But Biden has generated the opposite momentum and has yet to be arrested. And it’s not just about the horse race. Biden failed to use his debate answers to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on the issues that matter most to Democrats: abortion, taxes, character and the former president’s perceived threat to democracy and America’s founding values. This, and Biden’s somewhat delusional disbelief in his own mid-30s approval ratings and the apparent state of the race, fueled Democratic despair.
Disappointment in Biden was on display as lawmakers filed into the meeting on Tuesday, many of whom refused to speak to reporters as they left. A source familiar with the Democratic senators’ luncheon told CNN’s Dana Bash that three senators — Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana — all told their colleagues they didn’t think Biden could beat Trump.
“I said that for real,” Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins late Tuesday. “I think Donald Trump is on track to win this election, probably in a landslide victory and take the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, said senators believe Biden will have to deal with unscripted situations to answer voters’ questions. Asked what would happen if Biden stumbled in such a situation, King said, “I think that’s a risk they’re going to have to take. If Biden’s OK, then it shouldn’t be a problem.”
One of Biden’s most staunch supporters, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, defended the president. “We have concluded that Joe Biden is old. We have found that he is old,” Fetterman told CNN. “But we also agreed that he is our supporter.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is rarely shy about speaking at length, was asked multiple times about Biden but responded only to “I stand with Joe” in an apparent attempt to cut off the flow of questions.
Biden was buoyed when New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who had personally expressed doubts about his status as a presidential candidate, said he would now endorse him. But the New York Democrat implied that his decision was driven not just by his belief that Biden was the frontrunner, but also by the difficulty of dislodging the party’s frontrunner. “I haven’t given up. Biden has been very clear that he’s going to run. He has a great track record and is one of the best presidents of the last century. Trump would be an absolute disaster for democracy. That’s why I’m enthusiastically endorsing Biden,” Nadler said.
The president also enjoys the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, a key force in the House Democratic Caucus. Many of the CBC’s members are in heavily Democratic districts and may not be under as much pressure as the frontline Democrats who criticized the president’s debate performance. Rep. Mark Veasey of Texas criticized Biden’s attempts to bounce back from the debate and expressed concern for those vulnerable colleagues. “From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think it’s enough to get there. I don’t think that dog is going to hunt,” Veasey told CNN’s Manu Raju. “He still has a long way to go and I think there are stronger candidates out there who could beat Trump at this point, but if he says he’s going to stay, then he’s the nominee,” Veasey said.
Rep. Mickey Sherrill of New Jersey, who has lavished praise on Biden’s performance as president and his victory over Trump in 2020, became the seventh House Democrat to call on Biden to step down on Tuesday. “I know President Biden cares deeply about the future of our country, so I urge him to declare that he will not run for reelection and to lead the process of selecting a new nominee,” she said.
Some Democratic leaders tried to defuse their own party members’ fears by attacking Trump. “All of us in the House Democratic Caucus understand what this election means,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, the caucus’ chairman. “Donald Trump cannot be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office, and we cannot allow his extremist allies to pass a national abortion ban or dangerous Project 2025, which would undermine our democracy and empower Trump’s worst impulses,” the California Democrat said. But the force of his presentation at the press conference only served to highlight a line of attack that Biden largely missed during the debate.
In Las Vegas, with the Democratic candidates in a light-hearted mood, Vice President Kamala Harris used the legal rhetoric of a former prosecutor to attack Trump. “I would say that someone who denigrates immigrants, who promotes xenophobia and incites hate should never again have the opportunity to stand in front of a microphone or hold up the seal of the president of the United States,” she said.
For Democrats who see Harris as a better candidate than president, her impassioned speech was a reminder of another avenue for the 2024 election that Biden is trying to close.
