REPORT: Joe Biden given one week to stand down.
Joe Biden has been told he has a week to win over Democrats or they will move to oust him after a disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.
Party donors and congressmen called on Mr Biden to abandon his second run for the presidency after he fluffed his lines repeatedly and at one point froze completely during the first head-to-head debate of the 2024 election campaign.
In a shaky, hoarse voice, the 81-year-old launched attacks on Donald Trump and defended his policy record, pausing several times to repeat his sentences or correct himself.
Trump was widely acknowledged the winner of CNN’s Thursday night debate.
On Friday afternoon, Mr Biden insisted in a defiant speech in North Carolina he could still win the election but told supporters: “I know I’m not a young man…I don’t debate as well as I used to.
“I give you my word as a Biden* [that] I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job. Quite frankly, the stakes are too high.”
Nevertheless, Mr Biden is facing calls from a number of Democratic strategists, donors and politicians to suspend his campaign and make way for a younger candidate at this year’s party convention in August.
One congressman told Matthew Yglesias, a US political blogger: “I think the president has one week to prove he is not dead.”
David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, told CNN: “It’s kind of a Defcon 1 moment…they are three years apart, but they seemed about 30 years apart tonight.”
David Axelrod, another Obama adviser, said: “There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.”
* Drink! “When I first noticed him using this ‘my word as a Biden’ phrase during the 2020 campaign, I was puzzled. Has the Biden family been so prominently associated with honesty that when Joe says this, most Americans say, ‘Well, that settles it’? Of course not. In fact, Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, collapsed in disgrace specifically because of Joe’s dishonesty, when he was caught plagiarizing others — most notably British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — in his speeches[.]”
Related: MELTDOWN: Democrats Panic After Biden Has the ‘Single Worst Debate Performance in American History.’
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Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.
— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) June 28, 2024