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      Four Takeaways From Biden’s Post-Debate Interview

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      He downplayed. He denied. He dismissed.President Biden’s first television interview since his poor debate performance last week was billed as a prime-time opportunity to reassure the American people that he still has what it takes to run for, win and hold the nation’s highest office.But Mr. Biden, with more than a hint of hoarseness in his voice, spent much of the 22 minutes resisting a range of questions that George Stephanopoulos of ABC News had posed — about his competence, about taking a cognitive test, about his standing in the polls.The president on Friday did not struggle to complete his thoughts the way he did at the debate. But at the same time he was not the smooth-talking senator of his youth, or even the same elder statesman whom the party entrusted four years ago to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.Instead, it was a high-stakes interview with an 81-year-old president whose own party is increasingly doubting him yet who sounded little like a man with any doubts about himself.Here are four takeaways:Biden downplays the debate as a one-time flub.The interview was Mr. Biden’s longest unscripted appearance in public since his faltering debate performance. The delay has had his allies on Capitol Hill and beyond confused about what was keeping the president cloistered behind closed doors — or depending upon teleprompters — for so long.The eight-day lag has seen the first members of Congress call for him to step aside and donors demand that the party consider switching candidates. It also heightened the scrutiny of every word Mr. Biden said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Loyal Democratic Voters React to Biden Interview With Relief, and Despair

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      At least it wasn’t as bad as the debate.That was the verdict from some devoted Democratic voters who nervously tuned in to watch President Biden’s interview with ABC News on Friday. They were anxious to see the president respond to concerns about his age and cognitive abilities, and show wavering voters that he could serve another four years.“I think he showed in this interview he’s cognitively there,” said Jayden D’Onofrio, 19, chairman of the Florida Future Leaders PAC, which represents high-school and college Democrats in the state. “He was very straightforward about the fact that, yes, he is older. We have to recognize that.”But John Avalos, a progressive Democrat and former member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, said the interview made him weep. He was frustrated that Mr. Biden would not submit to a cognitive test, and said Mr. Biden’s doubling down on his refusal to leave the race could spell electoral doom for Democrats.“Biden is not demonstrating the traits that generate much confidence,” Mr. Avalos said. “There are 300 million people who rely on his cognitive abilities, and he’s unwilling to take a test because of his pride?”Other Democratic voters said they thought Mr. Biden made clearer and more cogent arguments against former President Donald J. Trump than he had during the debate last week, and said Mr. Biden seemed more at ease.“I tell you, he looked a whole lot better than the debate,” said William Davis, a precinct delegate in Detroit and retired water treatment plant worker. “I think he did well. I’m a little nervous that he’s not going to be able to keep it up.”Mr. Davis said he was still unsure whether the president should stay in the race, despite Mr. Biden’s insistence on Friday that only the “Lord almighty” would cause him to leave the campaign.“I’m 67,” Mr. Davis said. “I’m not the same person I was two years ago. I’m confident in him, but — and there is that but — he should think about the country and the world. I think another Democrat could come in and beat Trump.”In Nebraska, Mo Neal, 73, who runs a social media page for Lancaster County Democrats, said that Mr. Biden seemed “gentlemanly and sedate” and that his demeanor compared favorably with Mr. Trump’s angry hectoring speeches.“I’m solidly behind Biden,” she said. “Even now.” More

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      Read the Full Transcript of President Biden’s ABC News Interview

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      ABC News taped its interview with President Biden on Friday afternoon and aired it at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Following is a transcript of the interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, between George Stephanopoulos and the president, as released by ABC News. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. President, thank you for doing this.PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you for having me.STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s start with the debate. Eh, you and your team said, have said you had a bad night. But your —BIDEN: Sure did.STEPHANOPOULOS: But your friend Nancy Pelosi actually framed the question that I think is on the minds of millions of Americans. Was this a bad episode or the sign of a more serious condition?BIDEN: It was a bad episode. No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn’t listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and — and a bad night.STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, you say you were exhausted. And — and I know you’ve said that before as well, but you came — and you did have a tough month. But you came home from Europe about 11 or 12 days before the debate, spent six days in Camp David. Why wasn’t that enough rest time, enough recovery time?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hakeem Jeffries Plans to Discuss Biden’s Candidacy With Top House Democrats

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      Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, has scheduled a virtual meeting on Sunday with senior House Democrats to discuss President Biden’s candidacy and the path forward, according to a senior official familiar with the plan.The session, which is to include the ranking members of congressional committees who make up the top echelons of the party in the House, comes at a time of profound worry among Democrats on Capitol Hill about Mr. Biden’s poor performance at last week’s presidential debate. House Democrats have not met as a group since, even as concerns have mounted about Mr. Biden’s viability as a candidate and the impact he could have on his party’s ability to win back control of the chamber and hold the Senate should he remain in the race. Mr. Jeffries has been in listening mode all week, refraining from pressuring Democrats to rally around the president but also encouraging them not to be rash in their public pronouncements as Mr. Biden and his team determine the best path forward.But Democrats have begun to splinter. Four in the House — Representatives Lloyd Doggett of Texas, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Mike Quigley of Illinois — have called for the president to withdraw, while others have made public their serious concerns about his ability to prevail in the race.On Friday, Mr. Quigley said he had had a “hard time” getting to the point of urging the president to get out of the race.But, he told MSNBC, “clearly, the alternative now is a very bleak scenario with, I would say, almost no hope of succeeding — and it doesn’t just affect the White House. It affects all of Congress and our future.”Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, has been working to organize a meeting of Democrats in his chamber to discuss their concerns about Mr. Biden’s candidacy and what should be done, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the effort who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity. More

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      Biden Stumbles Over His Words as He Tries to Steady Re-Election Campaign

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      President Biden sought to steady his re-election campaign by talking with two Black radio hosts for interviews broadcast on Thursday, but he spoke haltingly at points during one interview and struggled to find the right phrase in the other, saying that he was proud to have been “the first Black woman to serve with a Black president.”He also stumbled over his words during a four-minute Fourth of July speech to military families at the White House, beginning a story about former President Donald J. Trump, calling him “one of our colleagues, the former president” and then adding, “probably shouldn’t say, at any rate” before abruptly ending the story and moving on.Mr. Biden made the mistake on WURD radio, based in Philadelphia, as he tried to deliver a line that he has repeated before about having pride in serving as vice president for President Barack Obama. Earlier in the interview, he boasted about appointing the first Black woman to the Supreme Court and picking the first Black woman to be vice president.The president also made a mistake earlier in the interview when he asserted that he had been the first president elected statewide in Delaware. He appeared to mean that he was the first Catholic in the state to be elected statewide, going on to speak admiringly of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic.Mr. Biden and his top aides have said the president’s activities in the coming days are part of a series of campaign efforts designed to prove to voters, donors and activists that the president’s debate debacle was nothing more than what he has called “a bad night.”Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, criticized the news media for making note of the president’s stumbles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden les dijo a sus aliados que los próximos días serán cruciales para salvar su candidatura

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      Los comentarios del presidente son el primer indicio de que está considerando seriamente si puede recuperarse de su actuación en el debate. La Casa Blanca dijo que el reporte era falso.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El presidente Joe Biden les ha dicho a algunos aliados clave que sabe que los próximos días son cruciales y que entiende que quizá no pueda salvar su candidatura si no logra convencer a los votantes de que está a la altura del cargo tras su desastrosa actuación en el debate de la semana pasada.Según dos aliados que han hablado con el mandatario, Biden ha enfatizado que sigue profundamente comprometido con los esfuerzos por su reelección, pero entiende que su viabilidad como candidato está en juego.El presidente trató de proyectar confianza el miércoles en una llamada con su equipo de campaña, incluso cuando funcionarios de la Casa Blanca trataban de calmar los nervios en las filas del gobierno de Biden.“Nadie me está echando”, dijo Biden en la llamada. “No me voy”.La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris también estaba en la conversación telefónica.“No retrocederemos. Seguiremos el ejemplo de nuestro presidente”, afirmó Harris. “Lucharemos y venceremos”.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Business Leaders Call on Biden to Step Aside

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      A group of business leaders is calling on President Biden to step aside and make way for a replacement atop the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket.Leadership Now Project, a coalition of 400 politically active current and retired executives who mostly but not entirely lean left, issued a statement on Wednesday urging Mr. Biden to “pass the torch of this year’s presidential nomination to the next generation of highly capable Democrats.”The statement is unsigned, but Daniella Ballou-Aares, the group’s founder and chief executive, said that it was supported by an overwhelming majority of the members of Leadership Now Project.The membership includes Jeni Britton Bauer, the founder of Jeni’s Famous Ice Cream; Thomas W. Florsheim Jr., the chief executive of the footwear maker Weyco Group; Eddie Fishman, the managing director of the investment firm D.E. Shaw & Company; John Pepper, the former chief executive of Procter & Gamble; and Paul Tagliabue, the former commissioner of the National Football League.The statement comes as major Democratic donors are increasingly concluding that the party would stand a better chance of holding the White House with a different nominee in the wake of Mr. Biden’s weak performance in last week’s presidential debate with Donald J. Trump. But most donors and big money groups on the left have refrained from going public out of concern about generating a backlash.In its statement, Leadership Now Project called the prospect of a second Trump term “an existential threat to American democracy” and said that at the debate Mr. Biden “failed to effectively make the case against Trump, and we now fear the risk of a devastating loss in November.”The statement added that “we have heard from many individuals who share our deep concerns about the present course but fear speaking out” and concluded by imploring others “to join us in making this urgent call.”In an interview, Ms. Ballou-Aares, a business executive who was a senior State Department adviser during the Obama administration, said she had been disturbed by the messaging from the White House and other Biden supporters in recent days.“This sense that this is a small group family decision is not good for democracy,” she said, calling it “really inconsistent with where people were after watching the debate.”Her group, which consists of nonprofit arms and a political action committee, has endorsed candidates from both parties, and recently hosted at its annual meeting former Representative Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat mentioned as a possible replacement for Mr. Biden. More

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      ¿Qué sigue para Trump tras el fallo de la Corte Suprema sobre la inmunidad presidencial?

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      Analistas y observadores ya preveían, a grandes rasgos, la decisión que establece que los presidentes merecen protección considerable por sus actos oficiales. Trump lo proclamó como una victoria.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Un sistema jurídico que le ha propinado golpes dolorosos a Donald Trump en los últimos seis meses le acaba de dar una de las mejores noticias que ha recibido desde que empezó su campaña.El lunes, la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos, cuya mayoría calificada conservadora se consolidó con los magistrados nominados por Trump, le concedió al expresidente inmunidad parcial ante procedimientos judiciales ahora que intenta eludir una acusación formal del fiscal especial Jack Smith en relación con sus esfuerzos para impedir la transferencia de poder tras las elecciones de 2020.Desde hace meses, tanto analistas políticos como observadores de la corte ya esperaban, a grandes rasgos, este fallo: que los presidentes tienen derecho a una protección considerable por sus actos oficiales. Sin embargo, Trump lo proclamó como una victoria.“Este es un gran triunfo para nuestra Constitución y democracia. ¡Estoy orgulloso de ser estadounidense!”, escribió Trump en puras mayúsculas en su plataforma Truth Social.La decisión implica que es casi una certeza que un juicio sobre el caso se postergue hasta después de las elecciones de noviembre, y si Trump gana, es casi seguro que el Departamento de Justicia descarte el caso, según personas cercanas al exmandatario.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More