Biden aides working on plan to convince president to stand down
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Joe Biden advisers are working on a pitch to convince him to stand down his presidential campaign amid concerns that he can “never recover” from questions raised about his age in the last two weeks.
Aides on the 81-year-old US president’s campaign and White House teams are working out how to persuade him to leave the race after concluding that he has no chance of beating Donald Trump.
It comes as Mr Biden made a significant gaffe at the Nato summit on Thursday when he introduced Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” and referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice-President Donald Trump”.
World leaders downplayed Mr Biden’s gaffe as they faced the media but watching Democrats were less kind.
One told ABC News: “This is the greatest introduction of all time … It would be like introducing Winston Churchill and saying: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Hitler.’”
When asked if the president can serve another four-year term, Sir Keir Starmer said he should be “given credit” for the substance of the Nato summit.
He had “led” throughout the three-day summit, the prime minister said, and “spoken in every session, pulled people together.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron both cast the error as a mere “slip of the tongue”.
Speech was make or break moment
On Thursday, several US media outlets reported concerns among Mr Biden’s inner circle that his decision to fight the election will lose the Democrats the presidency and both branches of Congress in November.
His press conference on Thursday night at Nato’s 75th annual summit in Washington had been anticipated as a “make or break” moment for his chances of staying in the race.
Mr Biden’s presidency is in a perilous position after his bungled debate performance against Trump on June 27, when he froze on stage and forgot his lines.
A growing number of sitting Democrats have since said he should stand down his campaign, passing the party’s nomination to a younger candidate at this year’s Democratic National Convention.
Mr Biden has refused, saying his critics should challenge him for the nomination and telling one interviewer that only “the Lord Almighty” could convince him to suspend his campaign.
Strategists who work with him told the New York Times they were working on a three-pronged approach to persuade him to give up. They will argue that he will lose the election to Trump, that Kamala Harris stands a better chance of winning, and that the nomination could be passed to her without a major headache for the Democratic Party.
A Biden campaign official told NBC News: “He needs to drop out. He will never recover from this.” Another Democrat told CNN senior Biden aides had acknowledged that “this is going to get worse”.
Although Mr Biden has long suffered gaffes and trips on the world stage, he has only acknowledged his slowdown in the last two weeks, since the debate against Trump in Atlanta.
He blamed his performance in the debate on his hectic travel schedule, which he said had made him tired, and a cold. He has also admitted that he is “not a young man”.
However, senior Democrats now believe that concerns about the elderly president are great enough to mean he cannot win this year’s election. Polls conducted since the debate show his support is slipping in key battleground states that backed him in the 2020 presidential race.
Mr Biden’s team is reportedly testing his popularity in head-to-head polls with Ms Harris, in what some interpreted as an effort to shore up his position if it reveals that he outperforms his vice-president.
Published polls show Ms Harris has a popularity rating of around 40 per cent, similar to both Mr Biden and Trump’s ratings.
In head-to-head polls between Trump and the Democrats who could replace Mr Biden, only Michelle Obama consistently beats him. She has ruled herself out of the 2024 race.
Despite the concerns of the Biden campaign’s own staff, its leadership on Thursday sent a memo to staff claiming that they could still win the election. Jen O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the campaign managers, said “winning the ‘blue wall’ states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan is the ‘clearest pathway’ to victory”.
As the campaign pivots to swing states in the Midwest, Mr Biden is losing support in traditionally Democratic states, including New York.
Nancy Pelosi, one of his oldest allies, has privately recognised the concerns of Democratic lawmakers who want to oust him, but asked them not to go public until after this week’s Nato summit in Washington DC.
Several other Democrats, including the party’s leaders in both branches of Congress, have not matched Mr Biden’s strong denials that he is too old to stand again.
Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, said he was holding “candid and clear-eyed and comprehensive conversations” with representatives this week.
Some members of the party are frustrated that Mr Biden has refused to engage with criticism of his age and has instead browbeaten those who questioned him. In a defiant letter, he wrote: “I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump”.
However, a further blow came on Wednesday when George Clooney, a long-time Biden donor and supporter, said he should end his campaign because “we are not going to win in November with this president”. Clooney said Mr Biden was not the same man who had fought the 2020 election.
Andrew Bates, Mr Biden’s deputy White House spokesman, denied that his team was looking to replace him. “Unequivocally, this is not true,” he said. “President Biden’s team is strongly behind him.”
Those working on the campaign are concerned that even if the attempt to remove Mr Biden dies down, it will return as soon as he suffers another age-related gaffe. “There’s this general sense of just unbelievable holding your breath every time he does an event, every time he’s with people,” one top Democrat told CNN.
The news channel reported that Mr Biden had not held a full cabinet meeting since last year. One cabinet member said they were “uncertain of Biden’s condition because they so rarely see him”.
On Thursday, it was reported that the president’s team asked a radio station that interviewed him to edit out some of his remarks amid concerns they could embarrass him.
In the interview, Mr Biden reportedly said he had “more blacks in my administration than any other president, all other presidents combined”. It was previously revealed that campaign aides vetted the questions asked, allowing him to script his answers.
The decision to stand down lies with Mr Biden, who won the Democratic primary earlier this year and has the right to collect his party’s nomination next month. If he decided to end his campaign, he could choose to endorse Ms Harris or throw the nomination open in a “contested convention” where other contenders could set out their stall.
Mr Biden avoided any major errors where he met Sir Keir Starmer for the first time earlier this week. The pair joked about England’s 2-1 win over the Netherlands in the Euro 2024 semi-finals on Wednesday, which Mr Biden attributed to Sir Keir’s leadership.
