Joe Biden was headed for the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, to campaign both for re-election and for his survival as the Democratic presidential nominee.
In Washington, calls for the 81-year-old president to quit continued, while the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives said he had discussed the issue with Biden in private on Thursday night, after the US president’s press conference following the Nato summit.
In a letter to colleagues, Hakeem Jeffries of New York said discussions among party members in the House about Biden’s age and fitness for office had been “candid, clear-eyed and comprehensive”.
“On behalf of the House Democratic caucus,” he said, “I requested and was graciously granted a private meeting with President Joe Biden.
“That meeting occurred yesterday evening … I directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives and conclusions about the path forward.”
Biden’s response was not disclosed, nor the details of the caucus’s “conclusions”. But as the letter was released, an 18th House Democrat said Biden should quit as the presumptive nominee to face Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, this November.
As Biden headed for his campaign event in Detroit, the capital remained abuzz. At his press conference at the Nato summit on Thursday, Biden spoke assertively and showed his foreign policy experience but also made embarrassing slips, introducing Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as “President Putin” and referring to Kamala Harris, his vice-president, as “Vice-President Trump”.
Trump seized on that, posting on his Truth Social platform: “Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ press conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be vice-president, though I think she was not qualified to be president.’ Great job, Joe!”
Biden, speaking somewhat indistinctly at the press conference, had appeared to say of Harris: “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be vice-president [if] I think she’s not qualified to be president.”
Later, Biden fired back on X, formerly Twitter: “By the way: Yes, I know the difference. One’s a prosecutor, and the other’s a felon.”
Trump, 78 and facing questions about his own cognitive fitness, was convicted on 34 charges in New York arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star. He faces 54 other criminal charges, concerning election subversion and retention of classified information, and was fined millions of dollars in civil cases over business fraud and defamation arising from a rape allegation that a judge called “substantially true”.
Harris came to prominence as a prosecutor in San Francisco before becoming attorney general of California, then being elected to the US Senate and later selected as Biden’s running mate for the 2020 presidential election, where they beat the Trump-Pence ticket.
Biden’s re-election campaign said in Detroit on Friday night that he would target Project 2025, a policy plan led by the rightwing US thinktank the Heritage Foundation, a project Trump has tried to disavow but which Democrats say shows his extremist agenda.
Michigan is a swing state, choosing Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, its Black voting population a key part of Biden’s base of support. The Oscar-winning actor Octavia Spencer was set to appear with Biden on Friday.
Support in Washington looked much less sure, even as a new poll showed Biden improving since the disastrous debate against Trump in Atlanta which pitched Democrats into crisis.
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“Biden actually gained a point since last month’s survey, which was taken before the debate,” wrote Domenico Montanaro of NPR, a poll sponsor with PBS and Marist. “He leads Trump 50%-48% in a head-to-head matchup. But Biden slips when third-party options are introduced, with Trump [leading] 43%-42%.”
Politico Playbook, a newsletter consumed by DC commuters, noted telling dissonance in responses to Biden’s Nato performance, as, speaking anonymously, one Biden aide said the president exceeded expectations and had some great lines at the post-Nato summit press conference, while another said Biden has “lowered the bar” for performance “until it’s on the floor”.
On Friday morning, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the dean of the Congressional Black caucus, said the president “sometimes mangles words and phrases but all of that is almost natural for people who grew up stuttering”.
He added: “He has one of the best minds that I have ever been around … and so I would hope that we would focus on the substance of this man rather than the sometimes misspoken words and phrases, and how he has run this country.”
Asked about Democrats who want Biden to quit, and equivocations from senior figures including Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, Clyburn said: “The conversation should focus on the record of this administration, on the alternative in this election, and let Joe Biden continue to make his own decisions about his future.
“If he decides to change his mind later on then we will respond to that. We have until 19 August to open our convention” in Chicago.
Asked “Is this the same Joe Biden that we saw four years ago?”, Clyburn said: “No!”
“I’m not the same Jim Clyburn that I was four years ago and in 10 days I’ll be 84. But I’m a bit wiser than I was before … It’s biblical. When I became a man I put away childish things. Joe Biden has put away childish things because he has become a man. His opponent [Trump] is still a child.”
He said Biden was not the same physically but was the same mentally, adding: “He knows what a democracy is all about.”