Days after President Joe Biden said only the “Lord Almighty” could drive him from the race, he laid out a far more earthly scenario at his closely watched news conference Thursday night: His advisers would have to prove to him that he was headed for certain defeat.
But leaning into the microphone and whispering to dramatize his defiance, Biden made clear that he did not foresee this happening.
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“No one’s saying that,” he said. “No poll says that.”
He seemed to open the door to an alternative, then swiftly shut it. Sure, “other people can beat Trump,” he said, but it would be too hard to “start from scratch.”
The president’s first news conference since the debate amounted to a competent presentation, if not a compelling performance. But it remained in doubt whether it was enough to stop the bleeding of Democratic support that has threatened to hemorrhage. Minutes after he left the stage, the drip-drip-drip of Democratic members of Congress calling for him to step aside continued unabated.
“I believe I’m the best qualified to govern,” said Biden, who has for decades pointed to naysayers to fuel his own comeback narratives. “And I think I’m the best qualified to win.”
The high-stakes, mostly unscripted hour — Biden’s longest since the debate that sent his candidacy into a tailspin — came as some of those around him have talked about how to persuade him to drop out, and as his campaign has commissioned a survey to test the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris in a matchup he has insisted will never come to pass.
On Thursday, Biden at times flashed his rising frustration with those paid to help him, blaming staff members directly for his overstuffed schedule and obliquely for some of the recent reporting on his candidacy.
By the time Biden finished his first solo news conference this year, Republicans seemed more pleased with his steady showing — hoping a wounded Biden would soldier on — than Democrats were. Many in the party now worry that every unscripted Biden appearance through November will be a hold-your-breath moment.
“We don’t have a Democratic Party problem, we have a Joe Biden problem,” said Pete Giangreco, a former campaign adviser to President Barack Obama, who worries about Biden’s ability to drive a message against former President Donald Trump. “He can’t deliver the medicine to cure the disease because it’s always going to be about what’s wrong with him.”
David Polyansky, a Republican strategist who has worked on past presidential campaigns, including that of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida last year, described Democrats as “stuck in the mud.”
“They have a sitting president who is no longer capable of winning reelection or even proving to the public he can do the job effectively,” he said, “but apparently not bad enough for Democrat power brokers to move him out.”
Some Democrats were hoping that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who suggested pointedly that Biden had a decision to make just days after he said he had decided — would take the lead, as a fellow octogenarian who gave way gracefully and in her own time for the next generation of leaders.
Biden was quick to dismiss the talk consuming his party that he has been diminished by time. When a reporter suggested that he had acknowledged his limits at age 81, he pushed back with disbelief: “The limits I have acknowledged I have?”
Yet even as he waved off reporting about his need for earlier bedtimes, he confirmed he needed more rest. “It’d be smarter for me to pace myself a little more,” he said of a job that rarely offers much respite.
He tried to spin his seniority as an advantage with the kind of prepared line that allies had hoped he would deliver at the debate.
“The only thing age does is help you with — it creates a little bit of wisdom if you pay attention,” Biden said.
The post-debate problem is how closely everyone is paying attention, magnifying every mumble and mistake.
And the news conference was far from flawless. Biden flubbed the very first answer, referring to “Vice President Trump” instead of Vice President Kamala Harris. He cut himself off more than once. “Look folks, this is a — well, anyway,” he said.
But he also held his own, comfortably wading into the complexities of foreign affairs — the conflict in the Gaza Strip as well as the relationship between China and Russia — without the sputtering stoppages that defined his debate performance two weeks earlier. It was a level of fluency that, at the least, complicated the case for ousting an incumbent president who still wants to run.
Biden was prideful and even a tinge defensive about his achievements. Days after he had denounced “elites” lining up against him, Biden was citing elites, including Nobel laureates, who had praised him. “Find me an economist, a mainstream economist, who said we haven’t done well,” he said.
“How can I say this without sounding too self-serving?” Biden wondered aloud at another point.
He had barely finished speaking when the defections resumed.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became the latest lawmaker to call for Biden to step aside. “We must put forth the strongest candidate,” he said.
He was soon joined by Reps. Scott Peters of California and Eric Sorensen of Illinois, who became the 18th congressional Democrat to call for Biden to leave the race.
Biden in the news conference, and his campaign in a memo earlier Thursday, argued that it was time to move past the debate and unite behind him. They indicated little shift in strategy, arguing that the race could still be a referendum on Trump and what the former president might do if given a second term.
“The surest way to help Donald Trump is to spend his convention talking about our nominating process instead of the MAGA extremism that will be on stage in Milwaukee,” said the memo, which was signed by the campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and the campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez.
The news conference resulted in a bizarre and bipartisan symmetry on social media, where Republicans and White House aides were both celebrating Biden’s performance — albeit for wildly different reasons.
“Joe Biden is crushing it. Build Back Better,” Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist who hopes to become secretary of state, wrote in a post dripping with sarcasm.
“Tonight President Biden was knowledgeable, engaging, and capable,” posted Sen. Chris Coons, a confidant of the president from his home state, Delaware. “No one is more prepared to lead our nation forward than Joe Biden.”
Democrats have demanded that Biden do more to reassure the public — roughly three-quarters of which sees him as too old to do the job effectively — and his next test is set for Monday in a sit-down interview with Lester Holt of NBC News that will coincide with the first night of the Republican National Convention.
Biden’s final three words Thursday revealed much about the state of a race that has overwhelmingly been fixated on him for the last two weeks. They were a plea to start focusing on his opponent.
“Listen to him,” Biden said of Trump.
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