Biden shows his knowledge but stumbles over words at news conference (2024)

In one of the more jarring moments, Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Harris as “Vice President Trump.” The flub came hours after a separate event during the NATO summit in Washington when Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Russian President Vladimir Putin, immediately correcting himself.

In an indication that the news conference would not halt the calls for him to end his candidacy, three additional Democrats — Reps. Jim Himes of Connecticut, Scott Peters of California and Eric Sorensen of Illinois — issued statements shortly after it ended urging him to withdraw. That followed four members of Congress who had called on him to step aside earlier Thursday before the event began.

The news conference was ostensibly scheduled to mark the end of the 75th annual NATO summit in Washington, but it was immediately dominated by questions over Biden’s advanced age and precarious political standing after a June 27 presidential debate, when he struggled to complete some thoughts and fumbled answers on a range of issues.

When asked Thursday evening if he would reconsider running if his team presented him data that showed Harris would fare better against Trump, Biden said, “No. Unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win.’”

Standing at the center of a large stage, with a blue NATO backdrop and eight American flags behind him, Biden fielded questions from reporters for nearly an hour in an effort to display his mental acuity and verbal agility. He held court on multiple issues, ranging from his physical fitness to global conflicts. Some of his lengthiest answers were on foreign affairs, and he offered detailed responses about U.S. relations with Europe, China and the Middle East.

As he faced a bevy of pointed questions about his health, stamina and mental acuity, Biden was at times dismissive and at others self-deprecating, arguing that his performance as president was the best sign of his vigor while also suggesting that in the future he would need to reduce his activities.

He elaborated on an earlier comment he had made after the debate that he needed to end his days earlier. “What I said was, instead of my every day starting at 7 and going to bed at midnight, it would be smarter for me to pace myself a little more,” Biden said. “Instead of starting a fundraiser at 9 o’clock, start it at 8 o’clock — people get to go home by 10 o’clock. That’s what I’m talking about.”

He compared his pace in recent days with Trump’s, jabbing the former president for his limited public activities. “If you look at my schedule since I made that stupid mistake at the debate, I mean, my schedule has been full-bore,” he said. “And where has Trump been? Riding around in his golf cart, filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball? Look, he’s done virtually nothing.”

Some Democrats, including those who have privately said they want the president to step aside, said they thought he did relatively well at the news conference. Biden’s aides noted the positive responses from some lawmakers and argued that the president had cleared the bar in one of the most consequential events of his political career.

Whether that will be enough to stem the tide of defections will become clearer Friday.

By the time the news conference began, 16 Democratic House members and one senator had called for Biden to bow out of the presidential race. Other Democrats have publicly voiced their concerns, and several House Democrats were preparing to put out statements calling for Biden to step aside if he did not do well at the news conference, according to four people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

This week, Sen. Peter Welch (Vt.) became the first Democratic senator to call for Biden to step aside, Sen. Michael Bennet (Colo.) said he thought Trump was on track to win in a landslide, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) called on Biden to decide quickly whether he would stay in the race — despite the president’s insistence that he had decided to remain at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Concerns over the 81-year-old president’s age have dominated the public discourse at a time when Democrats want to be focusing on the threat they say Trump poses to the nation’s democracy. In a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Thursday, 85 percent of Americans said Biden is too old to serve four more years as president; 60 percent said Trump, who is 78, is too old to serve a second term.

That poll, conducted after the debate, suggested the race between Trump and Biden was a dead heat and changed little since April. Other polls, however, have shown more movement, and the Washington Post polling average suggests that Biden has dropped between one and two percentage points nationally in the past two weeks.

For his part, Biden has repeatedly said that he has no plans of exiting the race, arguing that he remains well positioned to defeat Trump in November.

Biden campaign officials downplayed the post-debate polling shifts, saying Thursday that they are focusing on the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

In a memo that was sent to campaign staff ahead of the news conference, Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote that Biden remains in contention in those states and urged Democrats to rally behind him rather than engage in self-destructive hand-wringing in the days ahead.

It is not clear how much that argument has swayed Democratic stakeholders. Ahead of the news conference Thursday, Reps. Bradley Schneider (D-Ill.) and Hillary J. Scholten (D-Mich.) released separate statements urging Biden to “pass the torch,” joining the growing list of elected Democrats wishing for a new candidate to take on Trump. Before the news conference Thursday, Reps. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) and Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) also called for Biden to step aside.

The turmoil has put an additional spotlight on Harris, who some Democrats have suggested would be a stronger candidate against Trump. Even as party officials weigh the possibility that she could become their presidential nominee if Biden steps aside, Harris has offered full-throated defenses of Biden since the debate, and he gave Harris unqualified praise during the news conference.

“I wouldn’t have picked her unless I thought she was qualified to be president from the very beginning,” he said. “I made no bones about that. She is qualified to be president. That’s why I picked her.”

Biden has occasionally struggled at previous major solo news conferences, and he has held them far less often than his predecessors.

Thursday’s event was the 37th news conference of his presidency, the fewest of any president during the same period since Ronald Reagan, according to data compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, professor emerita of political science at Towson University and the director of the White House Transition Project. By contrast, Trump had done 99 such events and former president Barack Obama had done 87 at this point in their presidencies.

Thursday’s event was especially important to Biden’s political prospects because Biden and his advisers have repeatedly downplayed the debate performance as simply a “bad night” rather than indicative of a broader decline in cognition.

On Wednesday, George Clooney, a Hollywood actor and top fundraiser for Biden’s reelection, publicly disputed that claim. In a New York Times op-ed, Clooney, who hosted Biden for a fundraiser last month, suggested that the president was losing the battle with time.

“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” That was a reference to Biden’s enthusiastic, profane endorsem*nt of the Affordable Care Act when it was signed by President Barack Obama.

But Biden received some endorsem*nts from foreign leaders he met with during this week’s NATO summit, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who attested to the president’s mental faculties.

Biden was “on really good form,” Starmer told BBC on Thursday, answering “no” when asked if the president was senile. Scholz gave a similar answer to PBS News when asked Thursday if he had any concerns about Biden’s health or his ability to serve another four-year term.

But the summit also included moments that some foreign leaders found unsettling, including his initial introduction of Zelensky as “President Putin.” Biden quickly corrected himself, saying: “He’s going to beat President Putin. President Zelensky. I’m so focused on beating Putin we got to worry about it.”

Officials in the room froze, realizing the gravity of the error, three people there said.

Some of the NATO leaders, all of whom are politicians themselves, are doubtful that Biden can turn things around, and many have begun preparing for a Trump presidency, according to an official at the summit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

Biden used the news conference in part to praise his management of the NATO summit, capping the three-day event in which he announced new support for Ukraine, lauded member countries for increasing their defense spending and mounted a forceful defense of the organization that Trump has often denigrated.

“I thought it was the most successful conference I’ve attended in a long time,” Biden said. “Find me a world leader who didn’t think it was.”

The coming week will be a highly eventful one in the presidential contest. Trump is expected to announce his running mate in coming days, and the Republicans are holding their nominating convention next week.

On Friday, Biden will travel to Detroit for a political rally, and he plans to visit Texas and Nevada next week.

On Monday, he will sit for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, an appearance that will air as the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee is getting underway.

Liz Goodwin and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.