A Defiant
Biden Says Only the ‘Lord Almighty’ Could Drive Him From the Race
President
Biden dismissed concerns about his age, his mental acuity and polls showing him
losing his re-election bid.
“I don’t
think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me,”
President Biden told George Stephanopoulos in an ABC interview on Friday in
Wisconsin.
Michael D.
Shear
By Michael
D. Shear
Reporting
from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/us/politics/biden-interview-stephanopoulos-abc.html
Published
July 5, 2024
Updated July
6, 2024, 12:17 a.m. ET
President
Biden on Friday dismissed concerns about his age, his mental acuity and polls
showing him losing his re-election bid, saying in a prime-time interview that
his sharpness is tested every day while he is “running the world.” He vowed to
drop out only if “the Lord Almighty” told him to.
During a
22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, which aired unedited, Mr.
Biden, 81, said there was no need for him to submit to neurological or
cognitive testing. He said he simply did not believe the polls showing him
losing. And asked how he would feel if former President Donald J. Trump were
elected in November, he brushed off the question.
“I’ll feel
as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do,
that’s what this is about,” Mr. Biden said in an interview that was intended to
assuage growing concerns about his age following last Thursday’s debate. But
with him speaking in a hoarse voice and remaining defiant throughout, there was
little indication that the interview would do much to stanch the bleeding
during the deepest crisis of a long political career.
Again and
again, Mr. Biden told Mr. Stephanopoulos that voters should consider his
accomplishments in office.
“Who’s going
to be able to hold NATO together like me?” he said. “Who’s going to be able to
be in a position where I’m able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where,
at least we’re checkmating China now? Who’s going to do that? Who has that
reach?”
Mr. Biden
repeatedly waved off “hypothetical” questions about whether he would step aside
for another Democrat if people he respects say that he can’t win in the fall.
“Look, I
mean, if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d
get out of the race, but the Lord Almighty’s not coming down,” Mr. Biden told
Mr. Stephanopoulos. He dismissed concerns by Democratic lawmakers as overblown.
“Have you
ever seen a group, a time when elected officials running for office aren’t a
little worried? Have you ever seen that? I’ve not. Same thing happened in
2020,” he said, lowering his voice to mock officials who question his
campaigning. “‘Oh, Biden, I don’t know what he’s going to do. He may bring me
down.’”
Asked if he
truly believed he was not trailing Mr. Trump in the race, he said that “all the
pollsters I talk to say it’s a tossup — it’s a tossup.” And he said he was
willing to take the risk that he was wrong about that.
“I don’t
think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me,” he
told Mr. Stephanopoulos.
The fact
that the president was confronted with questions about his mental competency
underscored the depth of crisis he is facing after the debate in Atlanta last
week raised questions about his candidacy. A growing number of donors and
several lawmakers have called for him to exit the race.
The
president challenged that reality on Friday, insisting that “the vast majority
are not where those folks are.” And he said no one around him has suggested
that he needed to submit to an independent neurological examination.
“No. No one
said I had to. They said I'm good,” he said. “Look, I have a cognitive test
every single day. Every day I’ve had tests, everything I do. Not only in my
campaign, but I’m running the world. And that sounds like hyperbole, but we are
the essential nation in the world.”
Mr. Biden
consented to the ABC interview — one of the few that he has given to news
organizations during his presidency — and traveled to Madison, Wis., for a
campaign rally in the hopes that strong performances could help rescue his
teetering presidential campaign.
It was his
first major interview since the debate, and he faced tougher questions than he
did during a set of friendly interviews that aired Thursday with two Black talk
radio hosts, during which he stumbled on his words and made a pair of verbal
gaffes.
But it was
far from clear that the interview or a routine rally, delivered with a
teleprompter and seen by just a fraction of the millions who watched the
debate, could begin to repair the political damage to his campaign, despite the
fact that he largely avoided any major stumbles like the ones that shocked so
many people during the debate last week.
In the
interview, Mr. Biden struggled to explain away that debate performance, once
again blaming it on a “bad cold” and appearing to suggest that he was caught
flat footed by Mr. Trump’s barrage of lies.
“The whole
way I prepared — nobody’s fault but mine, nobody’s fault but mine,” he said in
a meandering answer. “I prepared for that I usually would do sitting down as I
did come back with foreign leaders or the National Security Council, for
explicit detail.”
He added:
“The fact of the matter is that what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times.
I couldn’t. I mean, the way that the debate ran, not — my fault, no one else’s
fault. No one else’s fault.”
When Mr.
Stephanopoulos noted that he seemed to struggle from the first minutes of the
debate, Mr. Biden said: “Well, I just had a bad night.”
In one
exchange that echoed Mr. Trump’s obsession with crowd size, Mr. Biden bragged
about Friday’s rally, where several hundred people packed a small gym. He
asked, “How many people you think can draw crowds like I drew tonight? You find
many more enthusiastic than today? Huh?”
Mr.
Stephanopoulos responded: “I don’t think you want to play the crowd game.
Donald Trump can draw big crowds.”
The
interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos was broadcast in full just hours after Mr.
Biden vowed to stay in the race in front of the boisterous audience at the
Madison campaign rally, telling the crowd that he will ignore calls for him to
make way for another nominee.
“Guess what?
They’re trying to push me out of the race,” he said. “Well, let me say this as
clear as I can. I’m staying in the race!”
“I’m in
Wisconsin for one reason,” he said, “because we’re going to win.”
Mr. Biden’s
actions in the days since the debate are taking place under an intense
political microscope. Every word Mr. Biden uttered during the interview and
rally is being viewed through the lens of the twin questions hanging over his
campaign: At 81, is he too old? And can he still win?
For days,
Mr. Biden’s team has said no, he’s not, and yes, he can.
But it took
more than a week for the president to appear at the rally in Madison and in the
interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, letting anger fester for days as
Democrats built momentum for the idea that he should quit the race.
A group of
168 business executives and donors issued a letter on Friday calling on him to
step aside, including Paul Tagliabue, the former N.F.L. commissioner; John and
Tom Florsheim, the shoe company brothers; and Christy Walton, a Walmart heir.
Representatives
Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and Mike Quigley, Democrat of Illinois,
joined calls by two other House Democrats for Mr. Biden to end his re-election
bid. Mr. Moulton told a Boston radio station on Thursday that he should “follow
in one of our founding father, George Washington’s, footsteps and step aside to
let new leaders rise up.”
Senator Mark
Warner, Democrat of Virginia, is working to convene Democratic senators next
week to discuss a path forward, while 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.
Throughout
the day on Friday, Mr. Biden remained defiant and even testy.
In a brief
exchange with reporters after sitting for the ABC interview, he accused the
news media of having been “been wrong about everything” in predicting the
outcome of elections. And he dismissed Mr. Warner as “the only one” in the
Senate talking about encouraging him to drop out of the race.
“I’m
completely ruling that out,” he told the reporters as he boarded Air Force One
at Dane County Regional Airport, adding that he is “committing now, absolutely”
to another debate against Mr. Trump. A second debate is scheduled for
September.
Asked about
a succession plan, he said: “By the way, we do have succession plans. But what
do I need a succession plan for now?”
Michael D.
Shear is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, covering President
Biden and his administration. He has reported on politics for more than 30
years. More about Michael D. Shear
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