Democrats are going to do everything in their power to spin the headlines about President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance against former President Donald Trump.
Insert damage control. Except the damage has been done for months now.
According to the New York Times, the Biden campaign has made countless calls and scheduled campaign events in the 48 hours after Biden made a fool of the Democrat Party.
The 48 hours after the debate were a frenzied campaign within a campaign to save Mr. Biden’s suddenly teetering candidacy, a multiday damage-control effort to pressure and plead with anxious Democratic lawmakers, surrogates, activists and donors to stand by the president, the party’s presumptive nominee. Later on Friday, top White House aides worked the phones, with Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, calling the Democratic leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, to check in, according to a person familiar with the call. And by the afternoon, the Biden campaign had transformed its weekly all-staff call into a virtual pep talk to dispel any doubts creeping into the campaign offices in Wilmington, Del., and beyond. Via NYT.
Since the debate, people, including Democrats, have called on the 81-year-old president to step aside, citing his old age and mental acuity.
The Biden campaign has insisted to voters and donors that despite the president’s disastrous debate, he is the only candidate to be able to beat former President Donald Trump.
In the just four days after the debate, Biden held seven campaign events in an attempt to re-rally supporters.
“The all-hands efforts, from Wilmington to Washington, showed the depths of the damage Mr. Biden did to his re-election campaign in a mere 90 minutes,” the Times continued.
The Biden campaign has even gone as far as trying to stop reporters from interviewing voters.
Clio Calvo-Platero, the deputy communications director for the Biden campaign in Nevada, reportedly demanded that a New York Times reporter, Simon Levien, stop speaking with voters after Biden bombed the debate, handing Trump a win.
“As I spoke to voters at a Las Vegas rally for Vice President Harris, a Nevada Biden campaign staffer followed me and twice asked that voters end their interviews when their comments turned critical of President Biden,” Levien continued.
A voter began to tell Levien that Biden’s debate performance was “terrible” and that the Democratic Party needed to find a replacement for the president when a Biden staffer interrupted, saying “We’re at a Joe Biden event, so I’m going to cut you off there, sorry.”
Meanwhile, Taylor Avery, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, echoed a similar situation that happened to her during the same event.
This comes as nearly all of the New York Times columnists urged Biden to drop out of the race, saying that he did a good job during his first term but that it was time to leave the rest of the job to someone else.
This also happened to me. A staffer tried not once but twice to cut off my interview with a voter who said they thought Biden should step down. They then ushered me and the voter inside because “the Vp is almost here” but the VP did not show up for another 30 minutes. https://t.co/E8SLw4AtW0
— Taylor R. Avery (@travery98) June 28, 2024