Two weeks that imperiled Biden’s presidency left him on probation in the court of Democratic opinion

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden’s tribulations were previewed in Hollywood days before he got on the debate stage.

At a fundraiser organized by George Clooney and packed with luminaries including former President Barack Obama, Biden was a listless figure, perhaps merely jet-lagged after flying straight from Italy but clearly not the man they knew.

Oh brother, where art thou? Clooney wondered.

It was a flashing-light moment for the actor, producer and prodigious Democratic donor and for others in the crowd. Then came the debate debacle, which set off 50 shades of panic among Democrats and pitted Biden loyalists against those now convinced a successor should take the party into November.

Two weeks after debate night, more than 15 Democratic lawmakers have gone out on a limb and called publicly for a president they’ve long supported to exit the race. Many more kept their newfound alarm about Biden semi-private. Mega-donors froze in the moment, wondering if they were plowing fortunes into a lost cause.

The bleeding of support continued past Biden’s NATO news conference Thursday night. Immediately afterward, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, posted on X that Biden should end his campaign. Several others did as well.

From Michael Moore to James Carville to Rob Reiner, voices from the intelligentsia and liberal Hollywood pitched in over the past two weeks to tell the president he should go. He said hell no.

It’s been an excruciating reckoning for all in the family, and it’s not over.

Lawmakers were furious that the White House kept Biden in such a bubble for so long that Americans could be blindsided by how bad he was on the stage with Trump. Biden’s camp was furious at the public show of disloyalty by those who want him replaced on the ticket and the relentless focus on Biden’s every word and step.

Most stayed with Biden over those two weeks as dissent alternately flared, faded and sparked anew, like tamped-down embers in a dry forest. Democrats on both sides of the Biden divide were left fearing the prospects of a Donald Trump win.

“I think we could lose the whole thing and it’s staggering to me,” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told CNN, speaking for many others as well as himself. He meant the presidency, the Senate and the House, in what he worries may be a Trump landslide.

On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York told colleagues in a letter that he met Biden after the press conference the night before and “directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives and conclusions about the path forward that the Caucus has shared in our recent time together.”

How did Democrats get here? Some boiling points and turning points along the way:

June 27

With the calendar rushing toward the Democratic convention in August, the debate in Atlanta upended Democratic officials, lawmakers and voters. Biden was befogged from the first words he uttered, or muttered. Voters had long felt Biden, now 81, was too old to be effective but they had never seen him like this. More than 51 million people watched it.

Biden hadn’t been on his game for some time before June 27. He appeared pale and his movements were slow after the Group of Seven summit in Italy nearly two weeks earlier.

After the long flight from Europe, Biden was unable to turn it on for his 30-minute onstage conversation with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and Obama at the June 15 fundraiser. It’s not often a popular former president and the brightest Hollywood stars join to rally behind a candidate, and donors and other Democrats hoped the event would get Biden’s motor running. He was conspicuously lackluster.

“It is devastating to say so,” Clooney wrote in The New York Times this week, but the event convinced him that Biden, a man he loves, should go: “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

The White House, in the first of its shifting explanations for Biden’s troubling demeanor, said he was sick with a cold or the like when going into the debate. (The White House initially said Biden did not see a doctor, then said he had. Its explanation for Biden’s frailty evolved to jet lag.)

The debate left even some of Biden’s aides questioning privately whether his campaign could be salvaged. Some longtime Biden supporters called immediately for him to exit the campaign. But the prevailing view in the party was that he should stay for now and prove himself fit for the race, and fast.

He was, essentially, placed on probation in the court of Democratic opinion. At his NATO news conference, he acknowledged he has fears to try to put to rest. “I’ve got to finish this job,” he said. “I’ve got to finish this job.”

He was not gaffe-free at the NATO summit. In a pair of passing name jumbles, he referred to the Ukrainian president as Putin and his own vice president as Trump. But he displayed a wide-ranging and detailed command of policy that had been lacking in the debate.

The ‘bedwetting brigade’

The morning after the debate, the illness cited by Biden’s people seemed to have disappeared. He was spirited in scripted remarks at a North Carolina rally, but many Democrats weren’t shaking off what they had seen the night before.

After watching the debate, “I had to take a few more antidepressants than usual,” cracked Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York.

The most prominent Democrats talked up the past — Biden’s accomplishments — and the strength of the team supporting the president. Democratic leaders said people should focus instead on the lies Trump told. But it never goes very far when elites tell people what they should be talking about.

In an early sign of trouble, one Democratic senator did not presume that Biden would hang in for the election. “It’s his decision what he wants to do going forward,” Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed told WPRI-TV.

That weekend, the Biden campaign emailed supporters about a “flash poll” purporting to show that Biden was best positioned among potential replacements to defeat Trump. Actually, like other public polls, it showed no clear advantage for Biden over other possible candidates. Other public polling released in the immediate aftermath of the debate found that most watchers thought Trump outperformed Biden, although neither candidate’s favorability ratings shifted meaningfully.

In the email, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty branded the Biden doubters the “bedwetting brigade.” More sheets were about to be soiled.

The ‘freak-out’

On the Sunday news shows, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman stepped up to offer a defense of the president. He, too, had epically flopped in a debate.

Five months after a stroke, Fetterman was hopelessly muddled against his sprightly Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz. As with Biden, Fetterman’s people wondered why the candidate, on a long road to recovery, had ever agreed to go on that stage just days before the 2022 midterms.

“Same kind of a freak-out,” he said. “And I smoked Oz by five points.”

With no chance of recovering from being 81 to 85 in the next four years, Biden saw the cracks in his support widen, but, crucially, Democrats as a whole did not rush to judgment.

Old as he may be, Biden has had time on his side in this late-in-the-game crisis. With each tick of the clock, it becomes harder for Democrats who want him out to replace him.

But on July 2, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi lent credence to the doubts about Biden, saying she was hearing mixed opinions on whether he should stay. “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, is this an episode or is this a condition?” she said on MSNBC.

The first cracks

Within hours, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first lawmaker to say Biden should go. “I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw,” he said.

For days, Democrats had been imploring Biden to get out more, call more lawmakers and put himself in unscripted situations to show what he can do. “Come on, pick up the phone,” said Rep. Nanette Barragan of California, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a Biden supporter.

Biden’s dilemma was clear. The more he was encouraged to do in public, the more he increased the chances of making a mistake. Still, he agreed to sit down for questions with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos later that week.

But first, as scattered defections were picking up, Biden spoke in person and remotely in a closed session with Democratic governors. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, firmly behind Biden, called it a “bitch session” by unnerved governors.

In large measure, governors came away sounding supportive of Biden or at least quiet about discontent, and reported that he seemed on top of things.

Yet the session played into public perceptions of Biden as stretched thin, as he acknowledged he needs to get more sleep and limit evening events so he can go to bed earlier. The president joked that his health was fine and it was his brain that was the problem. The crack fell flat.

Panic 2.0

In 22 minutes with Stephanopoulos on July 5, Biden avoided another debacle like his debate — a matchup that had been proposed by his campaign and accepted by Trump’s. But the ABC interview left few Democrats reassured.

Biden’s ill-timed pauses, meandering moments and garbled words made some even more alarmed than they were before, because now the debate could not be written off as just one bad night. The ground shifted.

An architect of Obama’s two presidential election victories, David Axelrod, said it was all too much. Biden, he said, is “dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race.”

Rob Reiner, the Hollywood director, Democratic Party donor and “Meathead” of long-ago “All in the Family” fame, posted an expletive on X with his opinion that “It’s time for Joe Biden to step down.”

Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker who forecast Trump’s 2016 victory when most others on the left (and the right and the center) figured he would lose, appealed to Biden to not “let your enablers hound you into doing what your body is begging you not to do.”

Among governors, those who have been floated as presidential prospects voiced firm support for Biden, surely in part to avoid being seen as pretenders to the throne. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gavin Newsom of California left no daylight between the president and themselves.

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear told a news conference Thursday, “I support him as long as he is our nominee” but the Biden campaign needs to set “an aggressive campaign schedule” and provide “the information on his health that I think people have been asking for.”

For all that, the debate among Democrats over what to do in the aftermath of June 27 has been most pronounced in Congress, where Biden made career-long friendships in his decades as a senator. It’s the place where Biden, as president, has scored improbable wins for some of the top items on his agenda.

In inconclusive Capitol Hill meetings this week, more Democrats spoke up for Biden than against him, even as many suggested the private feelings were moving swiftly away from the president. The Congressional Black Caucus offered unqualified support and other groups circled the wagons, too. The list of Democratic House members who called for him to get out of the race grew, but the floodgates didn’t open.

On Monday, Biden sent a forceful open letter to congressional Democrats declaring: “Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It’s time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump.”

Gone Fishing

Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola was off fishing. She’d stepped back from the fray and headed home to spend the week packing fish into freezers for the winter, her summer ritual. “There’s nothing quite like being out on the water,” she posted on X on Monday with photos of her wharf-side.

With Biden’s allies stepping up pressure, the ground appeared to shift again, this time in his favor. One of those who had urged him to quit, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, walked that back. There was a lull in defections. But only for a blink of time.

On Wednesday, Pelosi again weighed in. Her words were exquisitely measured but instantly taken as a setback for Biden. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” she dodged when asked if he should run for president again, instead saying it’s his decision to make.

Days earlier, Biden had vowed only the “Lord Almighty” would make him quit. Pelosi did not take that yes as his answer.

In short order, Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont became the first senator to call openly for Biden to quit the campaign. This, after several others had held back from such an announcement while leaving no doubt in their public comments that the president had become a liability in their minds.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington was among them. “We need to see a much more forceful and energetic candidate on the campaign trail in the very near future in order for him to convince voters he is up to the job,” she said Monday. “President Biden must seriously consider the best way to preserve his incredible legacy and secure it for the future.”

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who took steps early on to bring colleagues together to assess the damage from the debate, said Biden needed to burst out of his protective bubble and “hear directly from a broader group of voices.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the longest serving Democrat in Oregon’s House delegation, became the ninth House Democrat to ask Biden to exit the campaign, followed Thursday by more.

The naysayers, though a distinct minority, aren’t outliers. Rather they are a mix of senior Democrats and some newer members who won closely watched races in swing districts and feel especially vulnerable now. They have given voice to many more who have said, whether publicly or privately, that Biden puts Democrats on a path to defeat.

Among the veterans, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, while stopping short of urging Biden to quit the campaign, said people are rightfully asking whether the president has the vigor to defeat Trump.

“There’s only one reason it is close,” he said of the 2024 race. “And that’s the president’s age.”

He added, “Everything is riding on this.”

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Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Colleen Long and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux contributed to this report.