It couldn’t get any worse for Joe Biden after that debate, could it? Could it?!
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was certainly happy to tell journalists at the NATO summit in Washington yesterday, on June 11th, that the 81-year-old Democrat is not so “senile” as to make him unfit to run for re-election.
But just hours later, ahead of a rare solo news conference (his first in more than seven months), the U.S. president delivered what was soon seen as another effective ‘Trump infomercial.’ Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—“who,” he said, “has as much courage as he has determination”—as “President Putin.”
In a press conference designed to “calm concerns about his age,” Biden then dug his hole even deeper, calling Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump” when asked about her by a journalist.
There’s no need for commentary here. The reactions of Biden’s own top team to the latest of his telling gaffes says it all.
The president said repeatedly during his event that “I’ve got to finish this job.” But minutes after its conclusion, House Democrat, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut called on him to withdraw from the race. Rep. Eric Sorensen of Illinois also urged Biden to put “country over party” by standing down. More are likely to join these calls in the days ahead.
Before longtime Democrat-backing actor George Clooney in an op-ed called on Biden—who he “loves”—to drop out of the presidential race, he reportedly reached out to former president Barack Obama, who “did not try to stop [the op-ed].” Indeed, CNN has described Obama’s doubts over Biden’s ability to win as “one of the worst kept secrets in Washington.”
Much of the mainstream media is treating all this as a major revelation. In an interesting piece in yesterday’s Washington Post , columnist Megan McArdle explored the late arrival of journalists to the (public) realisation of Biden’s health troubles, arguing that
Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream newsrooms, journalists tended, with a few noble exceptions, to give a Democratic administration trust it didn’t deserve. … As Biden’s decline grew more visible, people kept respectfully airing the administration’s insultingly implausible claims: that there was a secretly brilliant president flitting around the back corridors of the White House like Batman, while the videos of that same president acting befuddled on world stages were “cheap fakes.”
And when journalists did cover the issue, many outlets that had been pitilessly clear about Trump’s defects apparently couldn’t bring themselves to be quite so blunt about a president they liked—in part because that would make their friends mad, as well as the White House.
The problem for Biden is that the more he attempts to demonstrate that he is fit to re-run for office, the more he plays into his opponents’ hands.
