Biden defends his campaign as swing-state Democrat calls for him to exit race – as it happened
Democrats are divided after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance and subsequent gaffes that have thrown into question the viability of the campaign. Biden remained defiant, even as Democrats in Congress and donors joined a growing chorus calling for the president to step aside.
Congressional Democrats are to hold an emergency Sunday meeting to discuss Joe Biden’s tottering presidential candidacy after a primetime television interview failed to dispel doubts triggered by last week’s debate fiasco. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, scheduled the meeting for Sunday even as Biden struck a defiant posture in Friday’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has been widely discussed as a potential successor to Biden, is campaigning for the president today in Pennsylvania’s Bucks county, a key political battleground.The governor cast the election as one that is “about liberalism versus illiberalism”, highlighting the threats Trump poses to American democracy, and emphasizing Biden’s economic record.
Representative Angie Craig, a Democrat of Minnesota, is among the latest to call on Biden to exit the presidential race. Craig represents a swing district in suburban Minneapolis-St Paul. Some Democrats are concerned that Biden’s flailing candidacy could drag down House and Senate candidates down-ballot.
Donald Trump broke his silence on the doubts swirling around Joe Biden’s candidacy following last month’s debate debacle with a characteristically mocking social post urging Biden to stay in the race.
Biden is now leading Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to the latest Bloomberg/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states. In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the president is within the poll’s statistical margin of error.
What happens if Biden does decide to step away? Time is short to make a change.The Democratic National Committee announced weeks ago that it would hold a virtual roll call for a formal nomination before the party’s national convention, which begins on 19 August. Kamala Harris is emerging as the favourite to replace Biden if he were to withdraw, although governors Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan remain viable alternatives.A messy, divisive convention – where protests over the war in Gaza are already expected – would only reinforce the suspicion that, with American democracy hanging by a thread, the Democratic party is failing to meet the moment.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “American democracy and the force of the conservative movement that we’re seeing in the supreme court lacks a coherent, energetic counterpoint. The Democratic party is simply not up for the fight. The conservatives are marching ahead and the Democrats are flailing.”Jacobs added: “It’s reasonable to ask, why did it come to this with regards to Biden? Why weren’t party leaders intervening a year and a half ago to usher off Biden to bring in genuine competition? Instead, they leave it for a debate, which realistic leaders could anticipate how it was going to turn out.“The fact that Trump was lying and bullying was known going in and Biden seemed so incapable of responding and so surprised by it. It was a very powerful signal of his infirmity but also of the infirmity [of the] party in moving past him. Joe Biden almost certainly can’t win and the party seems incapable of processing that and taking action.”Before her public appearance in New Orleans tonight, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, has been drawing comparisons between the Republicans and the Democrats on reproductive health.Harris will be speaking at the Essence festival in New Orleans on Saturday evening and will be interviewed by Caroline Wanga, its chief executive and president.The festival says of the talk: “Black Women running things is our all-time favorite genre. You are cordially invited to witness a spirited conversation with Vice-President Kamala Harris.”In recent days, Harris has appeared to be much more on Trump’s mind, according to a leaked video clip that emerged earlier this week in which he talked about Biden being “broken down” and “quitting the race”.“He just quit, you know – he’s quitting the race,” Trump said in the clip obtained by the Daily Beast. “I got him out of the – and that means we have Kamala.”He went on to say Harris would be stronger than Biden, but that Harris was “also bad”. According to a report in Axios on Saturday citing unnamed Trump advisers, the ex-president would bombard Harris with attack ads if she looked to be becoming the nominee.It shows there is concern among Trump’s team, however, that a Harris emergence could get more attention than what looks like a coronation for Trump at the GOP convention in Milwaukee in mid-July, while the Democrats’ convention in Chicago is a month later with a likely bigger potential audience.The Guardian’s Sam Levin recently wrote about the Kamala Harris insiders rallying behind the vice-president to replace Biden if he were to bow out.With Project 2025, Donald Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want – and more, writes Guardian opinions columnist and former labor secretary Robert Reich:
Project 2025 is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.
This is another in a long line of Trump lies.
The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials who Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.
One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.
Another Project 2025 leader is John McEntee, another of Trump’s top White House aides. (McEntee recently went viral in a video in which he claimed he gives counterfeit money to homeless people to get them arrested.)
Even the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign appears in the Project 2025 recruitment video.
Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.
As the former chair of the Republican party Michael Steele put it: “Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”
America’s allies are worried that Joe Biden won’t be able to beat Donald Trump – and fear the consequences, Politico reports.These allies worry that a Trump victory would damage Nato and undermine the war effort in Ukraine. The magazine reports:
POLITICO spoke with 20 people connected to NATO or the alliance’s upcoming summit over the past month and heard that many allies already had quiet reservations about putting their trust in Biden well before the debate. Now, Biden must convince his counterparts that he’s not only up for the fight but will overcome a political crisis to stay in it.
“It doesn’t take a genius to see that the president is old,” said one official from a European NATO country. “We’re not sure that, even if he wins, he can survive four years more.”
Others went further. “It was painful to watch, let’s be honest,” an EU official said of the debate. “We all want Biden to have a second term to avoid dealing with Trump again, but this isn’t really reassuring.”
Speaking to POLITICO before the UK’s change of government on Thursday, a UK minister put it most bluntly: “Can the Democrat donors please get their act together and get Biden retired, so we have some chance of a candidate credible for voters?”
The Biden campaign has dismissed Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, the extreme second-term agenda developed by Trump’s close allies.“We can always rely on Donald Trump for one thing: to lie to the American people in pursuit of power. We saw that on the debate stage when he set a record. He lied about the economy, about his role in the January 6 insurrection, and about disrespecting our heroic servicemembers,” Biden said in a statement.“Donald Trump is lying again now. He’s trying to hide his connections to his allies’ extreme Project 2025 agenda. The only problem? It was written for him, by those closest to him. Project 2025 should scare every single American. It would give Trump limitless power over our daily lives and let him use the presidency to enact ‘revenge’ on his enemies, ban abortion nationwide and punish women who have an abortion, and gut the checks and balances that make America the greatest democracy in the world. It’s extreme and dangerous.”This evening, Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak in a moderated discussion at the Essence festival of culture in New Orleans.The vice-president has drawn extra attention in recent days amid calls for Joe Biden to step aside. Harris could be a natural successor to Biden should he drop out of the race.As my colleague, Guardian tech editor Blake Montgomery wrote, Harris’s base of supporters have been sharing memes about her with renewed enthusiasm:
Supercuts of her set to RuPaul’s Call Me Mother. Threads of her “funniest Veep moments”. Collages of jokes about her over a green album cover a la Charli xcx’s Brat. Numerous riffs on a comment she made about a coconut tree. Previous progressive snark about Harris has cast her either as an incompetent sidekick a la HBO’s Veep or as an anti-progressive cop, a reference to her years as California’s top law enforcement official. But as rumors circle about discussions of Biden dropping out of the presidential race, social media commentary on the nation’s second-in-command has grown more positive – even if ironically so.
Biden’s campaign has defended its choice to provide a radio host with questions for the president prior to an interview.“It’s not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer,” Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in a statement. But campaign officials “do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions”, she added.On Saturday morning, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, host of The Source on WURD in Philadelphia, told CNN she had received questions from the campaign for approval prior to her interview with the president. “I got several questions – eight of them,” she said. “And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.”Biden’s campaign has attracted heavy criticism in recent days for limiting and curating the president’s unscripted public appearances. Critics have said this has obscured Biden’s tendency to slip up.Joe Biden joined a biweekly meeting with the campaign’s co-chairs this morning, according to the White House, “to thank them and discuss their shared commitment to winning the 2024 race in the face of the dire threat Donald Trump poses”.Michigan governor Getchen Whitmer, whose name has been floated as a possible successor to Biden, as well as close Biden ally James Clyburn, a representative of South Carolina, and Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison were in attendance.Rebecca Solnit on Biden and Trump: The media is once again repeating the mistakes of 2016The Guardian opinions columnist writes:
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose, and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
Joe Biden is now leading Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to the latest Bloomberg/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states. In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the president is within the poll’s statistical margin of error.Overall, Biden is trailing Trump by just 2 percentage points in key swing states, despite voters’ misgivings about the president’s performance.The numbers paint a complicated picture and highlight Democrats’ difficult position after Biden’s poor performance at the presidential debate and swirling speculation about his stamina and fitness to serve another term. About a third of Democrats surveyed in the poll, which was conducted four days after the debate, said Biden should drop out of the race.But the poll also placed Biden in his strongest position yet, showing a narrowing gap between him and Trump and bolstering the case for his narrow path to victory.Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington DC neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.According to White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.The visit took place at the White House residence clinic on 17 January. Cannard has visited the White House eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.Biden has consistently rejected taking any cognitive test, including in August 2020 when he dismissed a reporter’s question with: “Why the hell would I take a test?” He has continued to dismiss the need for one and, according to aides, has not received one during his three annual physical exams during his term in the White House.The Washington Post on Saturday reported a White House aide saying that O’Connor, who has been Biden’s doctor since 2009, has never recommended that Biden take a cognitive test.Donald Trump has broken his silence on the doubts swirling around Joe Biden’s candidacy following last month’s debate debacle with a characteristically mocking social post urging him to stay in the race.“Crooked Joe Biden should ignore his many critics and move forward, with alacrity and strength, with his powerful and far reaching campaign,” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, wrote on his Truth Social site nine days days after the calamitous Atlanta debate that has left the president’s re-election campaign mired in crisis.Mercilessly trolling the fears of worried Democrats, the post continued: “He should be sharp, precise, and energetic, just like he was in The Debate, in selling his policies of Open Borders (where millions of people, including record numbers of Terrorists, are allowed to enter our Country, from prisons and mental institutions, totally unchecked and unvetted!), to Ending Social Security, Men playing in Women’s sports, High Taxes, High Interest Rates, encouraging a Woke Military, Uncontrollable Inflation, Record Setting Crime, Only Electric Vehicles, Subservience to China and other Countries, Endless Wars, putting America Last, losing our Dollar Based Standard, and so much more.“Yes, Sleepy Joe should continue his campaign of American Destruction and, MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN!”The gleeful post was Trump’s first explicitly open comment on the saga that has thrown the Democrats into turmoil, with the exception of a video that emerged this week in which the former president appeared to predict Biden was about to withdraw in favour of Vice-President Kamala Harris, whom he disparaged in profane terms.It was unclear whether Trump’s sarcasm-laden post expressing joy at a rival’s misfortune would have the blessing of his campaign strategists amid post-debate polling evidence suggesting that Harris would fare better than Biden in a match-up against the Republican candidate, which in turn fuelled a belief that the GOP would prefer a contest against the sitting president.Fretting Democrats may see Trump’s mockery as further evidence of Biden’s comparative weakness and push harder for him to step aside.In a Truth Social post this week, Trump referred to the vice-president as “laffin’ Kamala Harris” – in reference to her supposed personal trait of loud public laughter – while in a separate campaign statement he referred to her as Biden’s “cackling copilot”. 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