WASHINGTON: Democrats shocked by Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance urged the US president Tuesday to be transparent about his mental fitness as he faced the first call from his own side to drop out of the election.
Some supporters have expressed growing doubts about the 81-year-old after last week’s televised showdown with Donald Trump when Biden stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought — exacerbating fears about his age.
Congressman Lloyd Doggett became the first Democratic lawmaker to publicly call on Biden to make way for another candidate, saying he was hopeful the president would “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”
Nancy Pelosi, a former House speaker and a grandee of the Democratic Party, said in her own statement it was “legitimate” to ask whether Biden’s debate disaster was indicative of a deeper problem rather than a one-off.
Biden has not given a live interview or held a press conference since the debacle, meaning he has not had to give unscripted comments under pressure again.
ABC News announced that he would be interviewed by the network on Friday, with the first clips released that day.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday admitted the debate was “a bad night” for the president but added that Biden “knows how to come back” from adversity.
“We understand. We’re not taking away from what you all saw,” she told reporters. “I think the president’s work record certainly speaks for itself.”
She dismissed questions about Biden needing a cognitive test, and said the president would speak to high-ranking Democrats, before holding a press conference during a NATO summit in Washington next week.
The polling margins between the president and his Republican predecessor have been razor-thin and almost static for months, with Trump showing a slight advantage in the all-important swing states.
Biden pushed for an unusually early first debate in hopes that he could jolt the race while there was still time to build on any momentum gained — but the plan backfired.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told WPRI-TV he was “pretty horrified” by the president’s performance during the 90-minute CNN match-up, watched by more than 50 million Americans.
Jared Golden, a vulnerable Democrat in conservative-leaning House district, raised eyebrows with an op-ed in his local paper in Maine in which he said Biden’s poor showing “was not a surprise.”
“It also didn’t rattle me as it has others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months: While I don’t plan to vote for him, Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that,” he said, explaining he believed US democracy would endure.
The White House has always shrugged off concern about Biden’s mental acuity, sometimes with marked irritation.
His campaign — under pressure over its tactics — hit out at “self-important podcasters” in a memo widely seen as a swipe at a group of former Barack Obama staffers and slammed demands from “the bedwetting brigade” for Biden drop out.
But Vermont Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat, told news website Semafor on Tuesday that Biden’s team had “a dismissive attitude toward people who are raising questions for discussion.”
Biden has visibly slowed over the last year.
It has been several months since the president, who has fallen in public on several occasions, stopped using his plane’s high gangway, preferring a shorter, more stable staircase.
He has also surrounded himself with aides for the short walk from the White House to his helicopter on the lawn, preventing cameras from focusing on his stiff gait.
Biden, who has always been gaffe-prone, has not given a long press conference since January 2022 and spends almost every weekend in one of his Delaware homes, with no official schedule.
When he recently visited France to commemorate the 1944 Allied landings, he went straight from the airport to his hotel, where he remained for an entire day, with no public appearances.
