CNN
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No president has ever needed a public holiday like Joe Biden needs July 4.
Biden is battling frantically to save his political career by escalating defiance. But he’s in danger of being swamped by a rising tide against him as more Democrats express doubts that he can beat Donald Trump after a disastrous debate performance.
The president will gather family members who will be critical to his future deliberations on his reelection campaign at the White House for Independence Day — in sore need of a slow news day that would allow him to regroup for potentially the most critical 48 hours of his political career.
“I am running. I’m the nominee of the Democratic Party. No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving,” Biden declared to spooked campaign staff on a phone call on Wednesday as he searched for an elusive comeback.
But the tough emerging reality for the president is that the assurances, shifting explanations and spin that his political aides have come up with so far are not working — because there may be no answer to his predicament.
The image of an incoherent, weak and struggling president was seared on the minds of 50 million viewers a week ago. And even a far more competent damage control effort than the White House and the Biden campaign have mounted so far would have struggled to erase that impression.
Attempts to explain his struggles in Atlanta are only refocusing attention on the core problem: super majorities of voters doubt he’s fit enough to serve a new term that would end when he is 86.
On Wednesday for instance, the White House picked up Biden’s line that he was jet lagged after two trips to Europe in early June. Given that the president had been back on US soil for over a week at the time of the debate, this only begged fresh questions over whether he’s up to the onerous demands of the presidency — that frequently requires extensive travel.
The idea that delayed jet lag — in combination with the cold that aides said he also had — could cause Biden to trail off in the middle of sentences and fail to make a coherent case on issues basic to his campaign did nothing to arrest his political slide. And it meant that Wednesday was yet another day when the focus was on Biden’s disintegrating campaign rather than the grave threat to democracy and America’s political freedoms that the president warns is posed by Trump.
Things started bad for Biden on Wednesday and then got worse.
— A second Democratic elected official broke cover and called for Biden step aside from his reelection campaign. Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona told The New York Times he’d back Biden if he was the nominee but that “this is an opportunity to look elsewhere.” He added: “What he needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.” While few other lawmakers have been so frank, there are many more who share the views of Grijalva and Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett who spoke out on Tuesday.
— White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre endured yet another rough ride in the briefing room, as she came up with a new explanation of why Biden performed so badly in Atlanta, which she insisted was not an excuse. “What I want to say is, it’s the jet lag and also the cold right?” she said. “It is the two things and that occurred, and you heard it in his voice when he did the debate.”
— Biden launched a round of calls to key Democratic power brokers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, and his friend Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. He also recorded two radio interviews that will air Thursday in swing states Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And Biden had the Democratic governors to the White House. Two, Minnesota’s Tim Walz and Maryland’s Wes Moore, offered him a boost with supportive comments to reporters. But Moore, a Democratic rising star, also said: “We always believe that when you when you love someone, you tell them the truth. And I think we came in and we were honest about the feedback that we were getting. We were honest about the concerns that we are hearing from people.”
— There were the first signs on Wednesday that the Trump campaign is calibrating how far the ex-president would need to pivot if Biden abandons his reelect. Co-campaign chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles issued a statement warning that any replacement could expect a hammering for hiding “the truth from the American public” about Biden’s condition. “Every one of them has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive state and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years, especially Cackling Copilot Kamala Harris,” they wrote.
— Biden’s new reality was on show in the afternoon when he presided over a ceremony to posthumously award the Medal of Honor to two Civil War soldiers. The event was carried live on cable TV, in a sign that every move the president makes from now until November will be filtered through the prism of his debate failure and parsed for new signs of decaying faculties.
