You likely saw Wednesday’s front-page NYT report “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome.” It begins:
In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.
Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.
[…]
The recent moments of disorientation generated concern among advisers and allies alike. He seemed confused at points during a D-Day anniversary ceremony in France on June 6. The next day, he misstated the purpose of a new tranche of military aid to Ukraine when meeting with its president.
On June 10, he appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday. On June 18, his soft-spoken tone and brief struggle to summon the name of his homeland security secretary at an immigration event unnerved some of his allies at the event, who traded alarmed looks and later described themselves as “shaken up,” as one put it. Mr. Biden recovered, and named Alejandro N. Mayorkas.
He is certainly not that way all the time. In the days since the debate debacle, aides and others who encountered him, including foreign officials, described him as being in good shape — alert, coherent and capable, engaged in complicated and important discussions and managing volatile crises. They cited example after example in cases where critical national security issues were on the line.
Given the Independence Day holiday, you may have missed the report AP published late Wednesday night headlined “Biden at 81: Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful.”
President Joe Biden’s conduct behind closed doors, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in meetings around the world is described in the same dual way by those who regularly see him in action.
He is often sharp and focused. But he also has moments, particularly later in the evening, when his thoughts seem jumbled and he trails off mid-sentence or seems confused. Sometimes he doesn’t grasp the finer points of policy details. He occasionally forgets people’s names, stares blankly and moves slowly around the room.
Biden’s occasional struggles with focus may not be unusual for someone his age. But at 81 years old and seeking another four years in the White House, the moments when he’s off his game have taken on a fresh resonance following his disastrous debate performance against Republican Donald Trump. The president appeared pale, gave nonsensical answers, stared blankly and lost his train of thought.
The June 27 faceoff alarmed Democrats and his financial backers, in part, because Biden seemed so much worse than during the almost routine moments when he’s less sharp. And that has raised questions about whether he’s up for a campaign that’s only going to get nastier and whether he can effectively govern for another four years if he wins.
But there have been other notable signs in recent weeks, from Biden’s constrained itinerary during a recent visit to France to his flat demeanor during a big-dollar Hollywood fundraiser with top stars.
[…]
The way Biden acts in private, according to regular observers, often tracks how he comes off publicly. In both settings, he can be commanding one day and halting another.
A day after his debate blunder, Biden’s voice at a North Carolina rally was forceful, his eyes alert, his delivery confident. As he spoke, cheers filled the room.
“I give you my word as a Biden. I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job,” he told supporters. “Because, quite frankly, the stakes are too high.”
But sometimes, Biden speaks so softly that it is difficult to make out his words even with a microphone. He’ll stop mid-sentence and trail off during speeches. At other times he runs the room, leading the audience, joking and shaking hands with thrilled supporters, in clear command of the moment. His gait is often stiff, but sometimes he jogs.
[…]
One person who spends time with Biden regularly said there have been visible signs of his aging over the past year that the president’s team has failed to fully address. The debate performance accelerated concerns about what was already a slow-moving problem, even if Biden has offered assurances that he can still effectively govern.
Biden’s advisers have long been aggressively dismissive of questions about his age. But now they’re acknowledging that Biden’s slowdown is undeniable. The debate has forced the president to more frontally acknowledge the limitations of his age, when before he largely made light of it. But they’ve taken only largely cosmetic steps to minimize its prominence in the public eye.
They’ve reduced his use of a long staircase to board Air Force One in favor of a shorter one, and aides often accompany him when he walks in public to make his stiff gait less noticeable. While his schedule remains busy, aides have built-in recovery stretches — long weekends or extended stays in Delaware at his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes or at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland — to rest up after a grueling period of travel.
Three French officials who helped organize Biden’s visit to France earlier this month said their U.S. counterparts’ reactions to options offered for a state visit in Paris and D-Day commemorations in Normandy made them think the president’s health must be fragile.
They were told the U.S. president needed some time to rest and they felt Biden’s entourage was very protective of him.
Biden’s public interactions — with journalists especially — have been greatly limited under a mandate led by one of his top advisers, Anita Dunn. Even during major events with Democrats or other supporters, the White House sometimes limits how much time Biden spends with the audience, two people said. At best, it is a protective reflex meant to shield their longtime boss — many at the White House have been with Biden for decades. But it also can look like an effort to hide something.
New York featured a devasting report by Olivia Nuzzi yesterday titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.” After a longish setup about a recent speech to “a small group of powerful Democrats and rich campaign donors, trying to reassure them that he was not about to drop dead or drop out of the presidential race,” we get this:
In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?
Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.
When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly,that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds.“Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed.Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. At a White House event last year, a guest recalled, with horror, realizing that the president would not be able to stay for the reception because, it was clear, he would not be able to make it through the reception. The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after all.
Others told me the president was becoming increasingly hard to get ahold of, even as it related to official government business, the type of things any U.S. president would communicate about on a regular basis with high-level officials across the world. Biden instead was cocooned within mounting layers of bureaucracy, spoken for more than he was speaking or spoken to.
Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”
Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.
A NYT story (“Biden Tells Governors He Needs More Sleep and Less Work at Night“) on the front page of today’s edition reports:
President Biden told a gathering of Democratic governors that he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m., according to two people who participated in the meeting and several others briefed on his comments.
The remarks on Wednesday were a stark acknowledgment of fatigue from the 81-year-old president during a meeting intended to reassure more than two dozen of his most important supporters that he is still in command of his job and capable of mounting a robust campaign against former President Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Biden’s comments about needing more rest came shortly after The New York Times reported that current and former officials have noticed that the president’s lapses over the past few months have become more frequent and more pronounced.
But Mr. Biden told the governors, some of whom were at the White House while others participated virtually, that he was staying in the race.
He described his extensive foreign travel in the weeks before the debate, something that the White House and his allies have in recent days cited as the reason for his halting performance during the debate. Initially, Mr. Biden’s campaign blamed a cold, putting out word about midway through the debate amid a series of social media posts questioning why Mr. Biden was struggling.
Mr. Biden said that he told his staff he needed to get more sleep, multiple people familiar with what took place in the meeting said. He repeatedly referenced pushing too hard and not listening to his team about his schedule, and said he needed to work fewer hours and avoid events scheduled after 8 p.m., according to one of the people familiar with what took place at the meeting.
And prominent Democratic officials and donors are openly calling for Biden’s exit, despite his insistence that he’s going to stay in the race.
WBUR (“Moulton: Biden should exit election ‘and let new leaders rise up’“):
Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton says President Biden should bow out of the upcoming election.
Speaking with WBUR on Thursday, Moulton said he does not have confidence Biden could defeat former President Trump in November.
“President Biden has done enormous service to our country, but now is the time for him to follow in one of our founding father, George Washington’s footsteps and step aside to let new leaders rise up and run against Donald Trump,” Moulton said.
Moulton is the third sitting member of Congress to publicly say Biden shouldn’t run again — and the first from the Massachusetts delegation.
The Essex County congressman had released a statement Wednesday that questioned Biden’s ability to continue in the race but stopped short of calling for him to step aside.
The Washington Post reported 11 others have raised concerns. Moulton was more explicit Thursday, saying it was time for “a new generation of Democratic leaders.”
“The exact mechanism that we should follow in order for other leaders to rise up, whether it’s some sort of primary process, whether it goes directly to Vice President [Kamala] Harris, I’m not sure about that, that’s yet to be determined,” he said. “And that’s in many ways the substance of the deep, honest conversations that Democrats are having behind the scenes now and over the course of the past week.”
Moulton said he came to this conclusion after speaking with “dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of Democrats concerned that Trump has gained an advantage in the presidential race following Biden’s poor debate performance last week.
NYT (“Major Democratic Donors Devise Plans to Pressure Biden to Step Aside“):
After several days of quiet griping and hoping that President Biden would abandon his re-election campaign on his own, many wealthy Democratic donors are trying to take matters into their own hands.
Wielding their fortunes as both carrot and stick, donors have undertaken a number of initiatives to pressure Mr. Biden to step down from the top of the ticket and help lay the groundwork for an alternate candidate.
The efforts — some coordinated, some conflicting and others still nascent — expose a remarkable and growing rift between the party’s contributor class and its standard-bearer that could have an impact on down-ballot races, whether or not the donors influence Mr. Biden’s decision.
[…]
And financial supporters are urging elected officials at all levels to publicly pressure Mr. Biden to withdraw, signaling support for those who follow through. Some major donors like Reed Hastings have gone public with calls for Mr. Biden to stand down.
Gideon Stein, a donor and operative with deep connections in Democratic politics, said his family was withholding $3.5 million in planned donations to nonprofits and political organizations active in the presidential race unless Mr. Biden stepped aside. He said that virtually every major donor he had spoken with believed that “a new ticket is in the best interest of defeating Donald Trump.”
Abigail E. Disney, a filmmaker who is an heir to the Disney fortune, said in an email exchange that Mr. Biden’s campaign and committees supporting it — including the Democratic National Committee, super PACs and nonprofit groups — “will not receive another dime from me until they bite the bullet and replace Biden at the top of the ticket.” Ms. Disney, who has been a major Democratic donor, added, “Biden is a good man who has served his country well, but the stakes are far too high to allow timidity to determine our course of action.”
Damon Lindelof, a Hollywood producer who has donated more than $115,000 to Democrats this election cycle and who attended Mr. Biden’s fund-raiser in Hollywood last month, published an essay in Deadline urging what he called a “DEMbargo” of Mr. Biden and other Democratic candidates until or unless Mr. Biden stands down. Mr. Lindelof said in a text-message exchange, “No one is eager to donate to anyone until the proverbial dust settles.”
It’s possible that the President will allay some of these fears with his interview with George Stephanopoulos today. But the fact that he’s taping it during the day rather than doing it live past his bedtime likely isn’t helpful.
Like my co-blogger Steven Taylor, I’m skeptical that Biden will drop out of the race. Men with the ego necessary to succeed at that level of politics are prone to overestimate their abilities, and having spent decades vying for that office, it’s got to be amazingly difficult to give it up once he finally has it. Still, I’m coming around to agreeing with Adam Serwer: if Biden does drop out of the race, he should resign his post and turn the reins over to Vice President Harris.
If Biden is incapable of campaigning because of his deterioration, he is also not capable of being president. And if he is incapable of being president, then he should resign and allow Vice President Kamala Harris to take the oath of office.
Whoever holds the office should be in full control of their faculties. It does no good to point out that Trump was deranged but energetic at the debate, that he rambles incoherently, that he is a criminal, an authoritarian, and a racist. It is obviously, incontestably true that a senile president with a competent and ethical staff would be preferable to an authoritarian one who wants to fill his administration with guys who sound like school-shooter manifestos. But unfortunately Trump is propped up by a cult of personality whose members will not abandon him no matter what he does, and if Biden is unfit to debate and campaign, then he is also not fit to govern.
The earlier Biden resigns, the faster the Democratic Party can move to reunite behind the new nominee and concentrate its efforts on keeping Trump from returning to the White House. Harris would become the party’s presumptive nominee, enjoying the prestige and advantages of incumbency. She is also the only candidate who can legally access the financial war chest the Biden campaign has amassed. As Brian Beutler writes, “it’s impossible to identify the most prudent path forward with certainty.” There is no clear way to know if Harris is a politically riskier option than Biden. But if Biden’s mental state is as bad as it appeared at the debate, then there is no other choice.
There are growing indicators that the debate was not an anomaly. It’s simply how an 81-year-old man performs when he’s tired and under stress. There’s no shame in that. But there is ample reason to believe that he’s simply not up to the grueling job he’s seeking to hold until he’s 86.
If, as he himself keeps emphasizing, the very future of American democracy is at stake, then it seems that he owes it to the country to step aside if that’s the case.
