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Did Anyone Miss This Significant Change in Biden's Attitude Regarding Dropping Out of the Race?

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  July 12, 2024 7:00 AM

Joe Biden’s NATO presser wasn’t a total trainwreck, but it did come off the tracks, especially when he called Donald Trump his vice president. The presser, which lasted just under an hour, supposedly was well-received in Biden land. That’s not necessarily an achievement; all Biden had to do was not fall over. It has become a Rorschach test of sorts, with people on both ends of this in the Democratic Party seeing whatever they want to see. Biden supporters think he “stuck the landing,” while others wallow in despair as the president did well enough to survive another day but didn’t do poorly enough to make the case to dump him ironclad. 

However, the questions about his mental fitness remain. While the Left is happy Biden didn’t have a repeat of June 27 with no opponent opposite him; the media knows this NATO press conference wasn’t a turning point regarding his mental decline. The Democratic Party infighting will continue to rage. Susan Glasser had more about Biden’s “less-than-awful” presser (via The New Yorker): 

…for those who listened to the full hour of Biden’s press conference, it wasn’t, in the end, the gaffe that made this a poor performance. It was Biden’s over-all halting, painful delivery. It was his struggle to find words, and the fact that when he did find them they were often not the right ones. Most important, it was his inability to make the case for himself—and his difficulty prosecuting the case against Trump. 

This was nothing like the debacle of the debate, but a quieter sort of fail—that of an eighty-one-year-old who is struggling to stay onstage, who still thinks he has wisdom to impart and a job to finish. Biden insisted on Thursday, as he has before, that he is ready to continue in the world’s hardest job, and he protested when a reporter for the Financial Times suggested he had acknowledged in recent days some limits he might put on the twenty-four-hour-a-day responsibilities of the Presidency. But then he began to elaborate on the limits—a shorter workday, a more disciplined schedule—he ought to put in place. He proceeded to go on about his wife being mad at him for doing too much, about his staff sneaking new events into his already packed calendar. It was a painful answer, an old-man answer. Because it was less of a car crash than the debate, the moment somehow felt even more tragic. 

All the more so because Biden is not Trump, whose vigorous projection at his speeches tends to mask their absurdity, incoherence, and flagrant incorrectness. Biden mixes up Putin’s name; Trump actually admires Putin. The current President clearly still knows what he’s talking about; indeed, his eyes lit up toward the end of the press conference when he started talking foreign policy. He did not seem confused. Or dangerous. He digressed. He offered mini-lectures on investing in China, on the need for a new industrial policy in the West, and on the evils of trickle-down economics. But it is not what America needed to hear from him tonight.

“I think it’s important to allay fears,” Biden allowed at one point. But had he done so?

The ending of her piece is the killer: the Democratic Party doesn’t have a debate problem; it has a Joe Biden one, and it’s one where this White House and associated campaign staff have no plan or messaging strategy to resolve it. Biden is old—that’s an unsolvable problem. It also carries the added sting of being a losing issue. In an Associated Press poll, Glasser noted that 77 percent felt Biden was too old to be an effective president in the summer of 2023. That figure ballooned to 86 percent in a Washington Post/ABC News poll in February 2024. Yet, Biden dismisses polls he doesn’t like, but everyone sees a degraded man who can’t do the job. 

Another notable moment in this presser was Biden’s seeming reversal in only having God the Almighty remove him from the top of the ticket. Biden told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that would be the only way to get rid of him, responding to the brewing rebellion among the party to dump him post-debate. Now, it seems like he’s goading for an open convention. If not, if polling shows that he can’t win, he’ll drop out. Yet, again, back to this man’s poll denialism, I doubt anything will convince Biden to drop out. It’s all about running out the clock before next month’s roll call vote makes his nomination official. In every scenario, Biden seems pleased to shove mutually assured destruction fatalism in the face of his detractors. For every other Democrat, it could be an electoral wipeout that didn’t need to happen:

The last part is something you already know: the media’s softball questions despite hounding the president, his staff, and Hill Democrats about the state of his health and his hold on the nomination. For years, the media protected Biden and refused to report on his mental slide until they were forced to do so post-June 27. At this NATO presser, RealClearInvestigations’ Mark Hemingway called out this spineless industry for not asking about the lack of cabinet meetings—none have been held in nine months—the stealth appointment of Hunter Biden as a top aide to his father and the deal with Biden’s mental health regarding multiple visits to the White House by a Parkinson’s Disease expert. 

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The Biden cabinet meetings were exposed as heavily scripted, almost like an act, with some of these officials unsure about Biden’s health because they meet so infrequently. One cabinet member relayed these concerns to Chuck Todd, NBC News, two years ago, and this person added that they weren’t sure if Biden should run again. 

The media knew about Joe. 

So, which one will predominate the cycle? Some think Biden mixing up Kamala and Trump will be the clear winner, but one thing is for sure: the bloodsports will continue until they don’t. Everyone seems to want Joe gone, or they’d be happy with him being replaced. It’s just that no one has a plan to make that happen, and neither does anyone want to have a meeting about drafting one.