President Biden on Friday dismissed concerns about his age, intelligence and polls that suggest he will lose reelection, saying in a prime-time interview that his intelligence is tested daily while he’s “running the world.” He vowed to step aside only if “Almighty God” so commands.
In a 22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that aired unedited, Mr. Biden, 81, said he didn’t need to undergo neurological or cognitive testing. He said he simply didn’t believe the polls that said he was losing. And when asked how he would feel if former President Donald J. Trump won in November, he dodged the question.
“I feel like I’ve done the best I can, and I feel like I’ve done the best job I know I can, and that’s what this election is about,” Biden said in an interview aimed at easing concerns about his age that had grown after last Thursday’s debate. But speaking huskily and defiantly throughout, it was hard to imagine the interview would do much to stem the bleeding of the most serious crisis of his long political career.
Biden repeatedly told Stephanopoulos that voters should consider his accomplishments while in office.
“Who can hold NATO together like I can,” he said. “Who can be in a position to at least keep the Pacific in a position to contain China? Who will do that? Who has the leverage?”
Biden repeatedly rejected a “hypothetical” question about whether he would retreat to another Democrat if people he respected told him he couldn’t win the fall election.
“If the Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, step down,’ I’d step down. But the Almighty isn’t going to come down,” Biden told Stephanopoulos. Biden dismissed Democrats’ concerns as overblown.
“Have you ever seen a group of people, a period, where an officeholder running for office isn’t a little bit concerned? I haven’t seen that. We had the same thing in 2020,” he said, lowering his voice to mock officeholders who question his campaign. “‘Oh Biden, I don’t know what you’re going to do. It could take me down.'”
Asked if he really believed he was losing the election to Trump, he replied, “Every pollster I’ve spoken to says it’s a 50-50 chance. It’s a 50-50 chance,” and said he was willing to risk being wrong on that point.
“I don’t think there’s anybody more qualified to be president or to win this election than me,” Trump told Stephanopoulos.
The fact that the president has been questioned about his mental competency after doubts were raised about his fitness to run during last week’s debate in Atlanta has underscored the seriousness of the crisis he faces, with a growing number of donors and lawmakers calling for him to withdraw from the race.
The president disputed that reality on Friday, arguing that “the vast majority of people are not in the same situation as these people,” and that no one has suggested to him that he should undergo an independent neurological examination.
“No. Nobody told me I have to do that. They told me I’m OK,” he said. “Look, I take cognitive tests every day. I take tests every day, in everything I do. Not just campaigning, I run the world. This might sound like hyperbole, but we are the indispensable country in the world.”
Biden gave the ABC interview, one of the few he has given to the press during his presidency, before heading to Madison, Wisconsin, for a campaign rally in the hopes that a strong performance could help salvage his shaky presidential campaign.
It was his first major interview since the debate, and he faced tougher questioning than he did in a series of friendly interviews with two black talk-show hosts that aired Thursday, during which he stumbled and made two gaffes.
But even though Trump largely avoided the kind of major gaffes that surprised many in last week’s debate, it’s not at all clear that the interviews and rallies, which were conducted via teleprompter and seen by only a fraction of the millions who tuned in to watch the debate, can begin to repair the political damage to his campaign.
In the interview, Biden struggled to make excuses for his debate performance, again blaming it on a “bad cold” and appearing to suggest he was caught off guard by Trump’s litany of lies.
“All the preparations I’ve been making are nobody’s business, nobody’s fault, just me,” he said in a roundabout response. “I was preparing, as I always do, to sit down and meet with foreign leaders and the National Security Council to discuss specific details.”
He added: “The fact of the matter is, from what I saw, he lied 28 times as well. I couldn’t have done it. So the way the debate was conducted was not my fault, it was not anybody else’s fault. It was not anybody else’s fault.”
When Stephanopoulos pointed out that he appeared to be struggling from the first minutes of the debate, Biden responded, “Well, tonight was just terrible.”
In one exchange that reflected Trump’s obsession with crowd numbers, Biden bragged about a Friday rally that drew a few hundred people to a small gymnasium. “How many people do you think could pull together a crowd like the one I pulled together tonight? A lot more enthusiastic people than we had today? Huh?” he asked.
Stephanopoulos responded: “I don’t want to play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw big crowds.”
The interview with Stephanopoulos aired in its entirety just hours after Biden vowed to continue his campaign before an enthusiastic audience at a Madison rally, telling them he would ignore calls for him to make way for another candidate.
“Guess what? They’re trying to throw me out of the race,” he said. “Well, let me be very clear: I’m staying in the race!”
In a speech delivered in a small middle school gym on Friday, Trump addressed the issue of age head on, saying he was not too old to create 15 million jobs, appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court or “beat Big Pharma.”
“I’m in Wisconsin for one reason only,” he said, “because we’re going to win.”
Biden’s actions since the debate have come under intense political scrutiny, with every word he utters in interviews and rallies being viewed through the lens of two questions hanging over his campaign: Is 81 too old, and can he still win?
For days, Biden’s team has been saying, “No, he can’t,” followed by, “Yes, he can.”
But it took more than a week for the president to appear at a rally in Madison and give an interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and anger continued to simmer for days as Democrats gained momentum around the idea that he should withdraw from the presidential race.
A group of 168 corporate executives and donors, including former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, shoe-making brothers John and Tom Florsheim and Walmart heiress Christy Walton, issued a letter on Friday calling on him to resign.
Reps. Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois, joined two other House Democrats in calling on Biden to forgo reelection. Moulton said on a Boston radio station on Thursday that Biden “must follow in the footsteps of one of our founding fathers, George Washington, and step aside so new leadership can rise.”
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is planning to convene Democratic senators next week to discuss the way forward, while Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the House Minority Leader, has scheduled a virtual meeting with House Democratic leaders on Sunday to discuss Biden’s candidacy.
Throughout the day on Friday, Biden remained defiant and cranky.
In a brief exchange with reporters after the ABC interview, he accused the media of being “wrong on every count” in predicting the outcome of the election, and dismissed the fact that “Mr. Warner is the only one” who has told the Senate he is urging them to drop out of the race.
“I completely rule that out,” he told reporters as he boarded Air Force One at Dane County Regional Airport, adding that he would “absolutely be at” the next debate between him and Trump, the second of which is scheduled for September.
Asked about succession planning, he replied: “By the way, we have a succession plan. But why do we need a succession plan now?”
