President Joe Biden has laughed off claims he needs more sleep and said his wife Jill “criticizes” him for working too much, but, in the most important news conference of his career, he vowed not to drop out of the presidential race.
The president answered questions for nearly an hour Thursday night as he tried to calm Democratic fears that he can’t beat Donald Trump in November and doesn’t have the mental capabilities to do the job.
There were some notable gaffes and Biden sounded hoarse and mumbled at times, but he made clear he is in the race to stay.
It’s unclear whether he has calmed the storm of concern in his party, where at least a dozen Democrats have publicly called on him to leave. There have been good times and bad.
President Joe Biden held a nearly hour-long press conference Thursday night
He got off to a bad start when he made a major mistake: calling his vice president, Kamala Harris, “Vice President Trump.”
But despite his mistakes, it is clear that he is still standing firm.
Biden attempted to mock what he called a “stupid mistake” in the first presidential debate and noted that in the upcoming debate he would not travel across “15 time zones” beforehand.
Two weeks before the debate, he had made consecutive trips to France, Italy and California.
He even criticized his staff for filling up his schedule, saying they were getting him into trouble with the first lady.
“I love my staff, but they add things. They add things all the time. My wife is nagging me,” Biden said.
And he rejected a report that he told Democratic governors after his debate disaster that he would scale back events after 8 p.m.
“That’s not true,” he said, laughing. “Look, what I said was that instead of starting every day at seven and going to bed at midnight, it would be smarter if I took a little bit more time,” Biden said.
Biden said it would be better, for example, to move a fundraiser up an hour. “If you start at 8, people go home at 10,” he said.
There have been reports that Jill Biden is one of the few people who could convince Joe Biden to drop out of the race.
But Biden said Thursday night The only way he would leave is if his staff “came to me and told me there was no way I could win.”
And some of his closest collaborators are doing just that.
They are considering how to tell him that he cannot beat Donald Trump in November and that he should withdraw from the race.
Other advisers agree that his chances of winning are zero and that there is an increasing likelihood that he will drag the Democratic candidates down with him.
“He has to drop out,” a Biden campaign official told him. NBC News“He will never recover from this.”
To convince him of that, his aides told The New York Times, they have to explain directly to Biden that he cannot beat Trump and persuade him that another candidate, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, can do it.
They also need to assure him that if he were to resign, the process for choosing another candidate would be orderly and not turn into chaos.
The White House rejected the report’s claims: “It is unequivocal that this is not true,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.
Other senior officials support the president.
“I have no concerns. He said he had a bad night,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday when asked about the president’s performance in the debate.
His White House advisers have not yet contacted him to discuss an exit plan, but they are taking steps to ensure they have all the information they will need.
The campaign is quietly testing a head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump, the Times reported.
The campaign is conducting a poll to see how the results play out. The data could allow them to make the case to Biden that Harris is a strong contender or reaffirm their view that she is.
Biden is said to remain unconvinced that any other Democrat besides himself can beat Trump.
Jill Biden is said to be one of the few people who could get Biden to drop out of the race.
At the end of his news conference, Biden responded to a question about whether his convention delegates are “free to vote their conscience” if they have doubts about his decisions, after acknowledging that he needed to continue to prove himself.
“Obviously, they are free to do what they want, but I received overwhelming support” in the primaries, he said.
“If tomorrow they suddenly show up at the convention, everyone says: ‘We want someone else.’ That is the democratic process.”
Then he lowered his voice to a whisper for emphasis: “That’s not going to happen.”