US President Joe Biden stubbornly and sometimes laboriously defended his mental acuity and ability to govern the country for a second term in one of the most important interviews of his political career on Friday on ABC.
“No one is more qualified than me” to “win” the election, the 81-year-old leader said during this twenty-minute interview, denying the reality of the polls which place him in clear difficulty against Donald Trump.
In his exchange with journalist George Stephanopoulos, crucial to maintaining his candidacy, the president repeatedly dodged the question of whether his physical and mental condition had deteriorated during his term.
Nor has he committed to undergoing independent medical evaluations, saying that being president is like taking “a cognitive test every day.”
But it is his cognitive abilities that have been the subject of heated discussions since his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump on Thursday, June 27.
“Denial”
“I was sick. I really didn’t feel well,” the Democratic leader said, citing a bad cold to justify his underperformance against his Republican predecessor.
Asked if he had reviewed his poor performance, Joe Biden responded with these strange words: “I don’t think so.”
The footage was immediately shared by the Republican camp, which has been claiming for years that the octogenarian president is senile.
“Biden is in denial and in decline,” Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on X.
Although he expressed himself more fluently than during his failed televised duel on June 27 with Donald Trump, Joe Biden nevertheless spoke in a stifled voice, and his sentences were sometimes incomplete or a little disjointed.
Will that be enough to reassure Democrats, who are increasingly calling for him to throw in the towel?
“The president is proud of his record, and rightly so. But he appears dangerously out of touch with people’s concerns about his ability to move forward and his position in this campaign,” said the highly influential David Axelrod, a former strategist for Barack Obama, on X.
“Lord Almighty”
The Democratic candidate therefore still has a lot to do to erase the disastrous impression left by his debate against Donald Trump, whose immediate consequences he was not at all successful in managing: a wave of calls for his withdrawal in the press and a surge in concerns about his mental health within his party.
Four Democratic lawmakers have already unequivocally called on Joe Biden to drop his candidacy. Democratic Governor Maura Healey has called on him to evaluate his candidacy “carefully.”
The president brushed these calls aside.
“If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I would get out of the race, but he’s not going to come down,” he told ABC.
The Democrat appeared much less energetic than in a campaign speech he gave, using a teleprompter, shortly before taping the interview in Madison, Wisconsin.
“You think I’m too old to beat Donald Trump?” he asked at the rally, to which the audience responded with a resounding “No!”
There is no desire to give up on the part of Joe Biden’s campaign team either.
She released an intense July battle plan Friday that includes a flurry of TV spots and trips to key states, including the southwest during the Republican convention, which runs July 15-18.
Joe Biden is also due to host a summit of NATO leaders next week, and will hold a press conference on Thursday, another highly anticipated exercise.