Joe Biden on Friday dodged questions about his mental fitness and electability in a TV interview aimed at drawing a line after a disastrous debate performance that prompted him to withdraw from a re-election contest.
With a revolt brewing among some nervous Democratic voters, lawmakers and donors, the face-to-face meeting with the ABC network was promoted as the most important meeting of the 81-year-old president’s long career.
But the 22-minute meeting offered little reassurance, as Biden blamed illness for his poor performance and repeatedly dismissed polls and fears within his party that the debate had seriously hurt his prospects.
“I was sick, I felt very bad … I had a very bad cold,” the president said without advance notice for the first time since his clash with his Republican rival Donald Trump last week.
The interview was meant to help Biden weather the storm, but his raspy voice and stilted answers immediately drew criticism from the Democratic Party, which labeled him “out of touch.”
Asked if staying in the race could endanger Democrats’ hold on the White House, Biden said: “I don’t think there’s anybody more qualified to be president or to win this race than I am.”
He shrugged off calls by doctors to assess his mental acuity, saying presidential duties mean “every day I’m cognitively tested. Every day, for every thing I do, I’m tested.”
The Trump campaign jokingly posted on social media that “Biden looks great,” concluding after the broadcast that the president “is in denial and declining.”
The interview comes at a time when Biden was hesitant and often spoke incoherently during his debate against Trump in Atlanta, leading to an uproar in his party and calls for him to drop out of the race.
– ‘I will beat Trump’ –
The Biden campaign has strenuously pushed back against any suggestion that he might step aside, and just hours before the ABC interview, released an aggressive schedule of campaign travel for the rest of July.
The president delivered a fiery speech at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin, in which he categorically declared, “I will stay in the race. I will defeat Donald Trump.”
Post-debate polls have shown Trump’s deficit widening, and at least four Democrats in Congress have called on Biden to step down, as have major newspapers, donors, and pro-Democratic political commentators.
According to US media, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are both planning crisis talks with lawmakers in the coming days.
In the Friday interview, ABC host George Stephanopoulos repeatedly referred to the growing Democratic clamour for negotiations on picking a new nominee, and asked Biden if he would step down if he believed he couldn’t defeat Trump.
“Well, it depends. If God Almighty comes down and tells me so, then I can do it,” he said.
Biden said he did not watch the debate, “I don’t think I did, no.”
He dismissed the idea that his poor performance was a sign of a more serious health problem.
“It was a bad episode, there was no indication of anything serious. I was tired. I didn’t listen to my gut in terms of preparation and — and I had a bad night,” Biden said.
David Axelrod, a top aide in Barack Obama’s White House and a sometime troublemaker for the Biden administration, said the interview showed the president is “dangerously oblivious” to concerns about his qualifications for the job.
“At this time four years ago, he was 10 points ahead of Trump (in the polls). Today, he’s six points behind,” Axelrod wrote on X.
The White House has announced that Biden will visit Pennsylvania this weekend before holding a press conference during the NATO summit in Washington next week.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
