Joe Biden’s hopes of surviving as the Democrat’s nominee take another hit in ‘Big Boy’ press conference

Joe Biden’s hopes of surviving as the Democrat’s presidential nominee have taken another hit.

There could not have been a worse moment for Joe Biden to refer to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky as ‘president Putin.’

Sure, it was just a slip of the tongue, and Biden quickly realised it and tried to recover, but there are only so many gaffes that Americans can handle from their 81-year-old president. It is almost impossible to conceive a more terrible gaffe than to mix up the courageous Zelensky with Putin, the thug who invaded his country.

With a new ABC/Washington Post poll showing that an astonishing 85 per cent of Americans now believe he is too old to seek a second term, the crunch time for Biden’s future is fast approaching.

Biden delivered the Putin gaffe in full view of the world during a NATO presentation with Zelensky during which Biden said: “And now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he does determination, President Putin.’

Barely an hour later Biden held a rare freewheeling press conference simply to prove to the country that he still had the cognitive ability to deal with unexpected questions, a faculty which deserted him so disastrously during his debate with Donald Trump.

In the end, Biden handled the press conference in an average fashion, stumbling over some words even when just reading from the teleprompter. He used the moment to attack Trump in the hope of reducing the focus off himself.

But as soon as he was asked a question, he had another gaffe, referring to his vice president Kamala Harris as ‘vice-president Trump.’ Later on he mixed up Russia with China.

There was certainly nothing in the press conference which might change the minds of those who have already decided that Biden should abandon his bid for a second term in the White House.

This is Biden’s fundamental problem. As confidence in his cognitive ability crumbles, he has no way to claw back that confidence except through improved and competent performances over a long-period of time.

But the Democrats don’t have the time to wait to see if that, frankly unlikely, improvement will come to pass. They need to make a decision here and now about Biden’s future with just over a month until the Democratic convention and less than four months until the November showdown with Donald Trump.

The fact is that with each day more members of Congress are calling publicly for the president to step aside from the race. For now, the establishment of the Democrat party is sticking with Biden who has made it plain that he has no intention of standing down. But Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have only been tepid so far in their support for Biden. Barack Obama is the key powerbroker here and if Biden loses the support of his former president, it is hard to imagine he will keep fighting. The Democrats are in a state of civil war, with Biden’s supporters trying hard to pretend that there is nothing to see here, while his critics are trying to gauge how to call for him to quit without tearing their party apart.

This crisis over Biden’s future is not going to go away. The ‘Putin’ and the ‘vice president Trump’ gaffes may not be the straw that break the camel’s back but they take Biden one step closer to his demise.