Three Democrats in Congress have called for Biden to drop out since Nato presser, bringing total to 17
A growing number of Democrats in Congress are publicly calling on Biden to end his reelection bid.
Three called for him to drop out shortly after Biden finished his Nato press conference, bringing the total to 17.
The most notable of these is Representative Jim Himes, who serves on the Intelligence Select Committee.
Here are the three who called for Biden to drop out tonight after Bidden’s press conference:
Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the House intelligence committee: “The 2024 election will define the future of American democracy, and we must put forth the strongest candidate possible to confront the threat posed by Trump’s promised MAGA authoritarianism. I no longer believe that is Joe Biden,” Himes, who represents a district in Connecticut, wrote in a statement posted on X.
Representative Eric Sorensen, Illinois: “It is more important than ever that our neighbors have a candidate for President who will communicate a positive vision for every person in this country,” Sorensen, who represents a district in Illinois, said in a statement posted on X. “I am hopeful President Biden will step aside in his campaign for President.”
Representative Scott Peters, California: “I ask President Biden to withdraw from the presidential campaign. The stakes are high, and we are on a losing course. My conscience requires me to speak up and put loyalty to the country and to democracy ahead of my great affection for, and loyalty to, the President and those around him,” Peters, who represents a district in California, said in a statement cited by several media outlets. Peters’ office did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters.
Biden initially used the final Nato summit press conference as something of a stump speech, brandishing his national security record in supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression and saying that the November vote was “much more than a political question … It’s a national security issue.”
He then turned to his record on the economy, border security and his efforts to broker a peace in the Israel-Hamas war to bolster his case for his campaign in November.
Biden spoke for 58 minutes, including 50 minutes of unscripted question-and-answer. He appeared most comfortable and cogent as he discussed thorny foreign policy questions.
“Don’t make the same mistake America made after [Osama] Bin Laden,” he said he told Netanyahu, as he sought to ward off a potential occupation of the Gaza Strip. “There’s no need to occupy anywhere. Go after the people who did the job.”
He also indicated that European countries were prepared to cut their investments in China if Xi continued to “[supply] Russia, with information and capacity, along with working with North Korea and others, to help Russia in armament”.
But at times he got lost in the weeds. Asked about reports that he had asked his schedule to be moved up, he said: “I’m not talking about, and if you’ve looked at my schedule since I, since I made that stupid mistake in the campaign, in the debate. I mean, my schedule has been full bore.”
“Where’s Trump been?” he continued. “Riding around on his golf cart? Filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball?”
Here is a summary of what happened during and after Biden’s press conference earlier today:
During a signing ceremony alongside Zelenskiy on the final day of the summit, Joe Biden accidentally introduced Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy as “President Putin” in a gaffe that will fuel further concerns about his mental acuity that have threatened to scuttle his presidential campaign. Realising his mistake, Biden caught himself and said: “President Putin! We’re going to beat President Putin. President Zelenskiy. I’m so focused on beating Putin. We’ve got to worry about it. Anyway, Mr. President.
Later, while taking questions from reporters, Biden mistakenly called Kamala Harris ‘Vice-President Trump’. Asked if he has concerns about vice-president Harris’s ability to beat Donald Trump if she were at the top of the ticket, Biden said he, “wouldn’t have picked vice-president Trump to be vice-president if I didn’t think she was not qualified to be president. From the very beginning, I made no bones about that. She is qualified to be president. That’s why I picked her.”
He was also asked whether he would step down if staff showed him data that indicated Harris would be more likely to beat Trump in the election. He said he would not step down unless staff showed him data that said there was no way he could win.
Biden was asked several questions about whether he is fit to run for president. In response to one, he said he was, “the most qualified person to run for president”. He said he beat Donald Trump once, “and I will beat him again”. Biden said there’s a “long way to go” with his campaign, and that he is “just going to keep moving” because he has “more work to do”. “We’ve got more work to finish,” he says.
Biden called the debate two weeks ago “a mistake” and said his schedule since then had been “full bore”, and that his wife, Jill Biden, had been critical of this.
Asked how he can assure the American people that he won’t have “more bad nights” like on the debate stage last month, Biden said the best way to assure voters was to ask if he was “getting the job done”. He said, “Can you name me somebody who’s got more major pieces of legislation passed in three-and-a-half years?”
Biden was asked if he wished he had done anything differently over the course of the Israel-Gaza war so far. Biden said he immediately went to Israel and was in immediate contact with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and the Jordanian leader, to try to get a consensus on how to get more aid and food and medicine into the Gaza Strip. “We pushed it really hard,” Biden says, but Israel was “occasionally less than cooperative”. He points to the Israeli war cabinet as being one of the most conservative war cabinets in the history of Israel. He said he put together a process for a two-state solution, because “the question has been from the beginning – what’s the day after in Gaza?”
Biden was asked what has changed since his candidacy in 2020, when he referred to himself as being a bridge candidate for a younger, fresher generation of Democratic leaders. Biden said what has changed is the “gravity of the situation” that he inherited in terms of the economy and US foreign policy. He says that most presidential historians have given him credit for having accomplished more than most any president since Johnson, “and maybe before that”, to get major pieces of legislation passed.
Biden said he is “determined” to keep running in November. “I’m determined on running, but I think it’s important that I allay fears. I say let them see me out there.”
As soon as the press conference wrapped, Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the House intelligence committee, joined the small but growing group of congressional Democrats asking Biden to step down.
Representative Scott Peters of California then called on Biden to withdraw his campaign. “Today I ask President Biden to withdraw from the presidential campaign,” he wrote in a statement obtained by Politico. “The stakes are high, and we are on a losing course.” A few days ago, Peters had indicated on CNN that he was “pretty close” to taking this stand.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his campaign want Joe Biden to stay in the race, according to people familiar with the matter, and have discussed taking steps to ensure they don’t push the president to withdraw amid escalating panic among Democrats following his recent debate performance.
Representative Eric Sorensen of Illinois then also joined Democrats calling on Biden to step down from his campaign. “In 2020, Joe Biden ran for president with the purpose of putting country over party,” Sorenson wrote in a statement. “Today I am asking him to do that again.”
Both Politico and Vanity Fair reported that George Clooney reached out to Obama before publishing an op-ed in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop out.
“While Obama did not encourage or advise Clooney to say what he said, he also didn’t object to it, we’re told from people familiar with their exchange,” Politico wrote. Vanity Fair also reported that Obama “did not try to stop [the op-ed]” by the actor and Democratic donor.
CNN is reported that former president Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as Vice President, met privately with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to discuss their mutual concerns over Biden’s presidential bid. Obama’s doubts over Biden’s ability to win is “one of the worst kept secrets in Washington”, CNN reported. “Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have spoken privately about Joe Biden and the future of his 2024 campaign. Both the former president and ex-speaker expressed concerns about how much harder they think it’s become for the president to beat Donald Trump. Neither is quite sure what to do,” CNN reported.
In case you missed this earlier: New York Times reports that the Biden campaign has been quietly polling to test Kamala Harris’s strength against Biden.
It reported:
Under siege from fellow Democrats, President Biden’s campaign is quietly testing the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald J. Trump in a head-to-head survey of voters, as Mr. Biden fights for his political future with a high-stakes news conference on Thursday.
The survey, which is being conducted this week and was commissioned by the Biden campaign’s analytics team, is believed to be the first time since the debate that Mr. Biden’s aides have sought to measure how the vice president would fare at the top of the ticket. It was described by three people who are informed about it and insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are imploring a New York judge to overturn his hush-money conviction and dismiss the case, arguing his historic trial was “tainted” by evidence that shouldn’t have been allowed because of the US supreme court’s recent presidential immunity ruling.
In a court filing dated 10 July but made public on Thursday, defense lawyers said the guilty verdict in the first-ever criminal trial of a US president should be set aside.
“The use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution,” wrote defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove. “The jury’s verdicts must be vacated.”
The supreme court released its immunity decision on 1 July, giving broad protections to presidents and insulating them from prosecution for official acts. It also said evidence of a president’s official acts cannot be used in a prosecution on private matters. The supreme court did not define what constitutes an official act, leaving that to lower courts.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, when asked about Orban’s initiative, said Ukraine would be rightly concerned about any attempt to negotiate a peace deal without involving Kyiv.
“Whatever adventurism is being undertaken without Ukraine’s consent or support is not something that’s consistent with our policy, the foreign policy of the United States,” Sullivan said.
Orbán’s self-styled peace mission has also irked many members of the European Union, whose rotating presidency Hungary took over at the start of this month.
The Hungarian embassy in Washington declined to comment on the planned meeting with Trump, which was first reported by Bloomberg.
Orban has been attending a Nato summit hosted by Democratic President Joe Biden. Hungary’s delegation voiced opposition to key NATO positions, w
Here is Himes on CNN earlier, after calling for Biden to step aside:
Jim Himes, the top Democrat on House Intel and one of the latest to call on Biden to get out: “Imagine that three months from now, we get another performance like there was in the debate, right before the election. Do you want to take that risk? I don’t." pic.twitter.com/HOk0FgWa2I
John Crace's politics sketch: 'You could sense the embarrassment as Biden spoke'
John Crace
Should I stay or should I go? If I stay there will be trouble … This wasn’t so much a press conference, more a job interview conducted in front of an audience of millions. One where almost everyone had already made up their mind that they would rather almost anyone else got the nod.
This was politics as a bloodsport. Painful to watch. Like intruding on a personal grief. Because there could be no winner here. Were Joe Biden to be word perfect and razor sharp, the doubts would remain about his cognitive abilities. The US president cannot erase his recent past. The gaffes come with ever increasing frequency. The obvious confusion. The long silences. The middle-distance stares.
The tipping point was last month’s presidential debate with Donald Trump. Biden tried to pass it off as one bad moment. The reality was that it was an excruciating 90 minutes. A complete meltdown no pretence or artifice could cover up. You would be embarrassed if this was an elderly relative. No one should be allowed to humiliate themselves in this way. But this was the most powerful man in the western world.
There was no coming back. Senior Democrats have become increasingly vocal about calling for him to step down. Nancy Pelosi has been notably careful in what she says. Congressmen have spoken out. George Clooney – reportedly with the implicit support of Barack Obama – has said it’s time for Biden to go.
But Joe is the only person who can’t read the room. He could step down with dignity. He could point to his record over the last four years and say that at 81 he has had enough. That it’s time for someone else to take over. Yet Biden has dug his heels in and so this can only end one way. With him being dethroned. Either by losing the presidency to Trump or being forced out by increasingly desperate members of his own party.
Earlier, Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Select Committee, Himes told MSNBC more about his decision to call on Biden to step aside:
He said:
The numbers, the trajectory and what Americans feel in their bones right now suggest not only that Biden would lose this race but that we would lose the Senate and the House”
Orbán meets with Trump, discusses 'ways to make peace'
Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has met with Trump.
Orban flew to Florida on Thursday to meet with the former US president after the end of the NATO summit in Washington, AFP reports.
Right-wing Orbán, whose country took over the rotating presidency of the European Union this month, has been a vocal supporter of Trump, and last met the 2024 Republican presidential hopeful in March.
“We discussed ways to make peace,” Orban said in a post on social media Thursday evening with a picture of the two leaders meeting. “The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”
