Biden grew more coherent as the interview continued, but he also became more detached from reality. The president denied the validity of all unfavorable poll results, including surveys showing that Trump expanded his national lead since the debate while Biden’s approval rating slid to an all-time low.
In an ABC interview, Biden charts a course for Dems’ worst-case scenario
The president appeared too frail to defeat Trump and too delusional to drop out.
Most concerningly for Democrats, Biden suggested that no information could possibly dent his belief that he is his party’s best hope for defeating Trump. At this point, that idea lacks all credibility. Biden has long trailed his Republican rival nationally and in every major swing state. In recent surveys, more than 70 percent of the public considers him too old to serve. Myriad Democrats have now gone on record saying that he should not be running for president and/or that their interactions with him made them fear for his cognitive well-being.
No interview or stump speech can erase these revelations. The news media will not stop scrutinizing the copious evidence of Biden’s senescence. The Trump campaign will not forget that it now possesses a treasure trove of humiliating clips of Biden’s brain freezes and devastating quotes from the president’s allies. Given this climate and the candidate’s limitations, it is not plausible that Biden can surge in the polls between now and November.
Yet the president appeared prepared to write all of this off.
“I remember them telling me the same thing in 2020,” Biden said. “‘I can't win, the polls show I can't win.’ Remember the ‘red wave’? Before the vote, I said, ‘That's not going to happen. We're going to win.’ We did better in an off year than almost any incumbent president has ever done.”
Here, Biden was referring to predictions that the Republican Party would win a landslide in the 2022 midterm elections. And it is true that Democrats greatly outperformed expectations, dominating many of that year’s most hotly contested races. But the polls in 2022 were also quite accurate by historical standards, and Republicans did win both the national popular vote and control of the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, Biden argued to ABC News that polling is not as accurate as it used to be.
Unwilling to reconsider his candidacy, Biden also proved averse to proving his mental fitness empirically, refusing to commit to submitting to cognitive and neurological tests and then sharing the results with the public.
Finally, the president ended the interview with a Trumpian bout of self-flattery, one that also served as an implicit rebuke of his vice president’s readiness to manage foreign affairs. “Who's gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?” he asked rhetorically. “Who's gonna be able to be in a position where I'm able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we're — we're at least checkmating China now? Who's gonna — who's gonna do that? Who has that reach?”
The Biden who spoke with ABC News Friday night was enfeebled, ineloquent, egotistical, and intransigent. He was a man who appeared both ready and willing to lead his party into the wilderness. Asked how he would feel if he stayed in the race and Trump were elected, Biden replied, “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.”
This is not the president’s best self.
What this moment asks of Biden is no small thing: to forfeit immense personal power so as to give his party its best possible shot of keeping an authoritarian reactionary out of office. Many statesmen would not be capable of summoning the humility and selflessness necessary for doing so. I still hold out hope that the president’s commitments to liberal democracy and the Democratic Party are in earnest and that he can find his way to such heroic self-knowledge and sacrifice.
After Friday night, however, it is clear that he needs his trusted friends in the Democratic leadership to show him the way.
Before Biden’s interview aired, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner was trying to unite his colleagues behind a push to get Biden out of the race. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, planned to discuss Biden’s candidacy with his chamber’s top Democrats on Sunday. If blue America’s congressional leaders join Democratic donors and backbenchers in imploring Biden to step aside, the president will likely accede to their demands. If they follow the lead of South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn and pretend that Biden’s performance Friday night settled all questions about his fitness for the nomination, then they will likely condemn America to a second Trump presidency.