Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and U.S. President Joe Biden react as they attend a Ukraine Compact meeting, on the sidelines of the NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington, U.S. July 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A defiant Joe Biden insisted Thursday that he will run for another term as U.S. president and beat Donald Trump, as a string of verbal gaffes at a major summit threw a harsh new spotlight on his fitness.

In a high stakes press conference at the end of the NATO summit in Washington, the 81-year-old acknowledged the need to “allay fears” among Democrats but said he was determined not to step aside.

His bid to portray himself as in command was undermined by introducing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as his Russian foe Vladimir Putin earlier in the day, and then referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump” at the news conference.

Mr. Biden’s candidacy has been in crisis since a disastrous debate performance against Mr. Trump two weeks ago renewed concerns around his age — and the rare solo press conference, lasting about an hour, was designed to show he still has what it takes.

“I’m the most qualified person to run for president. I beat him once, and I will beat him again,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump.

Already the oldest president in U.S. history, Mr. Biden said he was “not in this for my legacy” but to “complete the job I started.”

The president has faced a steady drumbeat of Democrats calling for him to abandon his 2024 candidacy, fearing that Mr. Trump is in a position to beat him.

More calls from House representatives came Thursday night after the news conference.

Mr. Biden made clear he supported Ms. Harris — who as vice president would take over from him in the event of an emergency, but is also seen by a growing number of Democrats as a stronger candidate at the top of the ticket.

‘Pace myself’

Amid reports that Mr. Biden’s campaign was quietly testing Ms. Harris’s strength in a theoretical match-up against Mr. Trump, the president said he would not have picked her if “she was not qualified to be president.”

He also denied reports that he needed to go to bed by 8 p.m., a time at which he was still holding his news conference on Thursday.

But after blaming his debate debacle on a mixture of jet lag and a cold he admitted it would be “smarter for me to pace myself a little more.”

He stressed too that neurological exams showed he was in “good shape” and said he would take another if his doctors recommended one, but they hadn’t.

Mr. Biden also fielded a series of foreign and domestic policy questions with detailed if occasionally meandering answers and relatively few slip-ups, though he did mix up Europe and Asia.

With questions swirling about his ability to hold his own against autocratic leaders like Mr. Putin or China’s Xi Jinping, Mr. Biden said he was “ready to deal with them now and three years from now.”

Yet his relatively assured performance failed to stop the bleeding, with three more Democratic lawmakers calling for him to quit the race, bringing the total to 17.

Mr. Trump meanwhile mocked Mr. Biden over his gaffes during the press conference itself.

“Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president… Great job, Joe!” Mr. Trump said on his Truth Social site.

President Joe Biden dismissed calls to end his reelection bid and denied that his debate performance wrought significant damage to his campaign, a defiant posture that risked further alarming Democrats who fear he has not honestly grappled with his biggest political crisis.

Biden on Friday in an ABC News interview refused to commit to an independent medical exam to reassure the public of his mental fitness, even as he insisted he has the stamina to serve another four years.

He did not accept that he trails Donald Trump in the polls, said he had not directly heard discussions among senior Democrats about asking him to step aside, and declared only the “Lord Almighty” would prompt him to even consider ending his bid.

And while the president, 81, avoided a significant gaffe like the ones that bedeviled his disjointed debate performance, the 22-minute prime-time interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos was unlikely to assuage concerns among the voters, donors, and Democratic officials who have spent the past week in a panic that he not only would fail to defeat his Republican opponent, but would not be able to serve another four years even if he managed reelection.

“I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Biden said when asked how he will feel in January if Trump wins the election, a nightmare scenario for Democrats.

Biden’s posture is perhaps the only strategy available for a candidate who is determined to continue his bid to win a second term. After Biden unveiled a revamped stump speech earlier Friday that acknowledged his age and more forcefully attacked Trump, his campaign indicated he plans to soldier on with more events Sunday in battleground Pennsylvania and beyond.

Multiple polls released following the debate showed Biden losing ground to Trump, with several showing him trailing by 6 percentage points. The share of voters in a New York Times/Siena College poll who believe he is too old to be president grew to 74%.

Dismisses Polls

When asked if he believes he is not behind, however, Biden said “all the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a tossup.”

One Democratic donor, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said they are angry at those in Biden’s orbit for not encouraging him to step down, calling the continued campaign delusional and selfish.

“He is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have” David Axelrod, a former Obama White House adviser who has been critical of Biden, posted on X after the interview.

Before Biden’s ABC appearance, Illinois Representative Mike Quigley joined a group of more than half a dozen House Democrats who have either explicitly called on the president to drop out, or said they believe he would lose to Trump in November.

Biden acknowledged Senator Mark Warner, a prominent Democrat from Virginia, was looking to rally other lawmakers to pressure him to drop out. The president said he had heard from others that he should remain in the race.

“Mark and I have a different perspective,” Biden told Stephanopoulos.

“If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down,” the president continued.

‘Wasn’t In Control’

Biden chalked up his poor debate performance to a “bad episode” brought on by a severe cold and that there was “no indication of any serious condition.” Asked when he realized that he was having a bad night, Biden suggested that at one point he had been distracted by Trump shouting.

“I realized that I just wasn’t in control,” he said of that moment.

Asked if he had watched his debate performance, which alarmed Democratic allies, Biden said “I don’t think I did, no.”

The interview came during a trip to Wisconsin in which Biden flatly declared he was not considering dropping out of the race. He said those looking to pressure him were disrespecting the will of Democratic primary voters, and that he still believed he represented the best chance for Democrats of defeating Trump.

The issue will be put to the test over the coming week in the face of growing concern from Democratic lawmakers and donors.

After his trip to Pennsylvania, Biden hosts NATO leaders starting Tuesday at a summit in Washington. The president’s ramped-up schedule is a response to panicked Democrats who have demanded he do more to prove to voters he is capable of serving another four years in the White House.

So far, some Democrats remain wary.

Biden met Wednesday behind closed doors with more than 20 Democratic governors in a bid to stem the crisis engulfing his presidency, telling them he is “in it to win it.” He received public votes of confidence from several of them, including California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

But privately, the governors had tough questions for the president and he acknowledged that he needs to get more sleep going forward, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

One of the participants, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, issued a statement Friday that stopped short of calling on Biden to drop out but appeared to push him to at least consider the possibility.

“I urge him to listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump,” she said.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

While Ronald Reagan, left, had pledged to leave office if he became ‘impaired’, President Biden affirmed that he is ‘racing to the end’.
| Photo Credit: AP

The age question for presidential candidates in the U.S. is more than four decades old. President Ronald Reagan in 1980 answered it with a pledge to resign if he became impaired, and in 1984 with a clever joke that reset his campaign from a stumbling debate performance to a 49-State landslide and a second term.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said to the question he knew was coming in perhaps the most famous mic-drop moment in campaign history. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The audience roared, even Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale laughed — and Reagan’s reelection was back on track.

Today, Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, is struggling for such a redemptive moment after a disastrous debate performance against Republican former President Donald Trump, 78. Those 90 minutes last week set off alarms among Democrats hoping Mr. Biden would keep Mr. Trump from returning to the White House — and heightened concern among voters long skeptical of how either elderly man would govern a complex nation of more than 330 million people for four more years.

More than two dozen people who have spent time with the President privately described him as often sharp and focused. But he also has moments, particularly later in the evening, when his thoughts seem jumbled and he trails off mid-sentence or seems confused, they said. Sometimes he doesn’t grasp the finer points of policy details. He occasionally forgets people’s names, stares blankly and moves slowly around the room, they said.

Mr. Biden has vowed to stay in the race, despite signs of eroding support on Capitol Hill.

“I am running … no one’s pushing me out,” Mr. Biden said on a on call Wednesday with staffers from his reelection campaign. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”

But the question facing him is far more intimate, according to one expert who covered Reagan’s health during his presidency. “The most important debate of the campaign is the one taking place right now in Biden’s head between the part of mind telling him he’s the chosen one, and the more self-aware part,” said Rich Jaroslavsky of the University of California Berkeley, formerly of the Wall Street Journal.

At its heart, the question — how old is too old to be President? — is about competence. And Americans have never had wider personal experience with the effects of aging than they do today.

A surge of retiring baby boomers means that millions more Americans know when they see someone declining. For many, this widespread experience made Mr. Biden’s halting performance during Thursday’s debate a familiar reality check.

Mr. Trump seemed more vigorous, even though he lied about or misstated a long list of facts. When he challenged Mr. Biden to a cognitive test, Mr. Trump flubbed the name of the doctor who had administered his.

“Is this an episode, or is this a condition?” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 84, wondered on MSNBC, reflecting the question dominating Democratic circles this week. “It’s legitimate — of both candidates.”

Reagan faced the same questions even before he was elected as the oldest President to that point.

That didn’t happen. Reagan served two full terms, leaving office in 1989.

Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Biden has made a similar pledge, and their campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

File picture of Dr. Sampat S. Shivangi
| Photo Credit: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

Eminent Indian-American physician Dr. Sampat Shivangi has been elected as an official delegate to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this month that would formally nominate former U.S. president Donald Trump as the party’s presidential candidate.

Mr. Trump, 78, is the presumptive Republican Party candidate for the presidential election.

An influential Indian-American community leader, Dr. Shivangi, has been elected as a National Delegate at the convention for the sixth time.

“It is a great pleasure and honour to share the news that I have been nominated and elected as (an) official delegate at the upcoming Republican National Convention to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from July 13 to July 19, 2024,” Dr. Shivangi said.

The four-day Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, would formally nominate Mr. Trump as the party’s candidate for the November 5 presidential election.

The nomination process would be completed by Republican delegates from across the country.

Dr. Shivangi, a lifelong member of the Republican Party and a founding member of the Republican Indian Council and the Republican Indian National Council, has been nominated as RNC delegate six consecutive times.

“This will be my sixth time serving as a National Delegate at the Republican National Convention to nominate the Republican Party nominee to contest the national presidential election,” he said.

“My nomination began as early as when President George W. Bush was nominated in New York, then-Senator George McCain, Governor Mitt Romney, (and) President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Now again to re-elect President Donald Trump in 2024 in Milwaukee,” he said.

He is the national president of the Indian American Forum for Political Education, one of the oldest Indian American Associations.

Over the past three decades, he has lobbied for several bills in the U.S. Congress on behalf of India through his enormous contacts with U.S. Senators and Congressmen.

“I feel this is a unique honour and an opportunity for an Indian American to represent the community at the national level,” he said.

Dr. Shivangi said he would be part of the luncheon hosted by Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi in honour of the delegates at Northern Lights in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 16, for the Mississippi delegates.

Washington, United:

American philanthropist Melinda French Gates, the ex-wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, endorsed President Joe Biden on Thursday for November’s US election, arguing that he is the best candidate for women.

“I’ve never endorsed a presidential candidate before. But this year’s election stands to be so enormously consequential for women and families that, this time, I can’t stay quiet,” she said on X.

“Women deserve a leader who cares about the issues they face and is committed to protecting their safety, their health, their economic power, their reproductive rights, and their ability to freely and fully participate in a functioning democracy.”

French Gates, who recently stepped down as president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the contrast between Biden and his Republican opponent Donald Trump “couldn’t be greater, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.” 

“I will be voting for President Biden,” she concluded.

Reproductive rights have been an effective political cudgel for Democrats in the two years since the conservative-leaning Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion a constitutionally protected right. 

A comfortable majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in most cases, according to extensive polling, and around half of states have measures in place to protect access.

The issue has been a major theme of the election campaign, with Biden supporting women’s right to choose and Trump failing to stake out a clear-cut position beyond pride in appointing three of the justices who struck down Roe v Wade.

French Gates announced in May that she would be using her $12.5 billion fortune to help “women and families,” making a first payment of $1 billion  toward the cause. 

She said the Supreme Court ruling on abortion had prompted her to devote herself to defending women’s rights.

Former New York mayor and businessman Mike Bloomberg also said on Thursday he was endorsing Biden and had donated $19 million to his campaign, according to the Washington Post.

Trump, meanwhile, received high-profile support from investor twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who announced they had each donated $1 million toward the Republican candidate’s election bid.

And businessman Timothy Mellon contributed $50 million to a Trump-supporting super PAC — an organization that pools campaign contributions, according to a New York Times report on Thursday.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

File photo of Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump.
| Photo Credit: AP

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, will not be a delegate representing Florida at the Republican National Convention in July due to prior commitments, the office of his mother Melania said on May 10.

On May 9, a campaign official said Barron Trump, 18, had been selected by the state party as a delegate from Florida, a notable move given that he has kept largely out of the public eye during the campaign.

“While Barron is honoured to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments,” Melania Trump’s office said in a statement.

In Florida, presidential campaigns submit a list of proposed delegates to the state party, which in this case would have included Mr. Barron Trump.

Delegates are allocated following primary contests in each state. While the rules are complex, delegates are typically assigned to represent a candidate at the convention, where the nominee is officially selected.

Mr. Donald Trump is set to face President Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.