A disaster debate and three weeks when Biden fell apart
After his stumbling and inarticulate performance against Donald Trump, the president did not do enough to calm his panicking party
At “watch parties” across America, Democrats looked on with horror as President Biden limped through the opening exchanges of his prime time debate with Donald Trump three weeks ago.
Rasping and inarticulate, the 81-year-old president trailed off and garbled answers. At one point, in front of a TV audience of more than 50 million people, he ground to a halt completely.
Even Trump, 78, appeared caught off-guard by his opponent’s collapse, but issued a lacerating reply to one early fumble by Biden. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows either.”
By the time Biden was helped offstage by the first lady 90 minutes later, knives were being sharpened, with open discussion on whether he should quit the race. It was the beginning of the end of the president’s re-election campaign.
Biden attempted to revive his campaign by appearing energetically at a rally, giving a meandering televised interview and confronting disloyal members of his party behind the scenes.
The debate disaster
One strategist admitted that the president’s performance was the worst debate of the televised era. Others described it as “our worst nightmare”.
Biden’s team had sought a June debate, the earliest in modern history, in an attempt to get ahead of the narrative that he was too old and tired for another four years in office. A repeat of Biden’s fiery State of the Union address in March would finally put to bed voters’ concerns about the president’s age and put the focus back on Trump, now a convicted felon.
Instead, Biden’s failure to make the case against Trump on the biggest platform of the campaign opened a civil war within the party.
Party leaders rallied to Biden’s side the next day. Barack Obama backed his former vice-president. “Bad debates happen. Trust me, I know,” he tweeted, referring to his own lacklustre performance in his first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012. It would be the last public show of support from the former president.
Meanwhile, other Democrats were already breaking ranks. In an early sign of trouble, the former Iowa senator Tom Harkin, a Senate colleague for two decades, declared the debate “a disaster from which Biden cannot recover”.
Attempts to recover
Concern simmered that Biden’s campaign was not taking the impact of the debate seriously enough. Pundits noted that after his own poor debate in 2012, Obama had hit the campaign trail hard, holding up to four events a day to get back in the race. Biden, by contrast, remained cloistered from view having disappeared for a weekend of fundraisers and a photo shoot with his family at Camp David.
At a fundraiser in the Hamptons the weekend after the debate, Biden sought to allay the concerns of nervous donors, declaring: “I promise you we’re going to win this election.” Instead, the campaign continued to drift while a New York Times/Siena College poll found that three quarters of voters saw Biden as too old to serve as an effective president. In the same poll before the debate, Trump was already beating Biden by three points among likely voters and six points among registered voters. In the post-debate poll, the former president extended his lead to six points among likely voters and nine among registered voters.
First congressman makes the call
On July 2, Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first Democrat in Congress to publicly call for Biden to drop out. Party members urged the president to prove himself at unscripted events to curb the damage. But the dilemma surrounding the president’s team was clear: doing more public events increased the likelihood of gaffes.
Biden sat down for his first unscripted appearance since the debate eight days later, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. He was defensive, insisting that only “the Lord Almighty” could persuade him to drop out of the race. When Stephanopoulos asked how he would feel if Trump was sworn back into office, Biden said: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all.”
Democratic strategists and pundits were appalled. For a party that feared Trump as an existential threat to American democracy itself, Biden’s fatalism appeared self-serving and out of touch with his own warnings about the dire consequences of defeat in November.
An angry phone-in, then a hammer blow from George Clooney
As the next week began, the president issued an angry letter to House Democrats insisting that he was going nowhere. On July 10, the president was dealt another blow when George Clooney wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times calling on the president to quit the race. The same morning, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, considered one of the most influential Democrats on Capitol Hill, went on Morning Joe urging Biden “to decide if he is going to run”.
NATO summit gaffes cause panic to spread
At a press conference to close the NATO summit, Biden confused President Zelensky of Ukraine with President Putin, and Kamala Harris with Trump. By the next day, donors were threatening to withhold dollars 90 million in donations from the campaign unless Biden dropped out. More would follow.
The drumbeat only intensified in what would be the final week leading to Biden finally dropping out of the race, with Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Pelosi privately increasing the pressure on Biden as panic set in that the crisis could not only cost Democrats the White House, but the House and Senate as well.
In the end there was no one final blow to Biden’s re-election campaign, but his Covid diagnosis, which confined him to Delaware for the weekend, made it clear that after a thousand proverbial cuts, his position was now untenable.
The Times
