Joe Biden immediately faced calls from Democrats to drop out of the Presidential race following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump last night, but the 81 year-old insisted he would go on. The Mail has more.
Biden’s campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt declared early this morning: “Of course he’s not dropping out.”
But a torrent of his own party members and strategists are clamouring for their aged President to throw in the towel off the back of the car-crash debate, with one anonymous Democrat telling NBC it was “time to talk about an open convention and a new Democratic nominee”.
“Biden is about to face a crescendo of calls to step aside,” one Biden-backing strategist told the New York Times, while another Democrat put it even more flatly to the Washington Post.
“We’re so f***ed,” he said. “He has great material. He just cannot deliver a single line.”
David Plouffe – a Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama‘s 2008 campaign – told MSNBC Biden’s showing was “kind of a DEFCON1 moment” – a reference to the highest alert level used by America’s defence community.
Plouffe also remarked that Trump and Biden looked “30 years apart”, despite an age gap of just three years between them.
One political analyst summed it up in the hours following the torturous 90-minute ordeal: “There’s going to be a lot of bedwetting (among Democrats) tonight.”
Trump meanwhile was seen contorting his face in shock and derision at Biden’s confused meandering and frequent gaffes in the debate, at one point telling millions of Americans watching at home: “I really don’t know what he [Biden] just said. He’s not equipped to be President. You know it and I know it.”
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley quips that “this wasn’t a debate, it was a medical emergency… Never mind, will he last four years? The audience wasn’t sure he’d last 90 minutes.”
“Now I’m certain: Donald Trump will win in November,” he adds.
On Substack, Eugyppius writes that “Biden has declined substantially over the past four years; at least in 2020, he could debate Trump with minimal coherence”.
Last night, after a full week of preparation, practice and apparently even advance access to the questions, he frequently forgot what he was talking about, offered blank baffled expressions to the camera while Trump spoke and had substantial difficulty leaving the stage when the event was over. Afterwards, as he greeted supporters, his wife Jill Biden praised him like a child: “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” Nobody can any longer deny that the United States is in the hands of a senile figurehead suffering from serious dementia. Biden remains in office for reasons of convenience and political patronage; who is actually steering the executive branch is anybody’s guess.
In the Telegraph it’s being reported that major Democrat party donors have now turned on Biden.
Donors have urged Mr. Biden to step aside, suggesting California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer as potential replacements amid rising panic about the future of the campaign. …
The high-profile Democrat donor, Mark Buell, raised the possibility of replacing Mr. Biden following the debate, saying: “Do we have time to put somebody else in there?”
Strategists working for at least three separate Democrats said they have received texts from party donors asking them if their candidate would step forward to replace Biden as the presidential nominee.
“Biden needs to drop out. No question about it,” one said, proposing a ticket led by Ms. Whitmer and Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland.
“This is terrible. Worse than I thought was possible. Everyone I’m speaking with thinks Biden should drop out,” one Democrat donor told NBC News.
One adviser told Politico that they had “taken no less than half a dozen key donors texting ‘disaster’ and [the] party needs to do something”.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.