“He Will Never Recover From This”: Biden Aides Turn Against Him

While the dam might not yet be breaking, there sure are plenty of leaks: Some Biden aides and operatives overseeing his reelection campaign now see his chances of winning against Trump at zero.

“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” one person working to reelect Biden told NBC News.

Concerns of Biden’s viability have grown following his shockingly bad debate performance in late June. Biden’s campaign at the time brushed aside widespread concerns from Democrats as ephemeral angst from “the bedwetting brigade.” Now it seems even some on his campaign see the writing on the wall, with some aides discussing how best to convince Biden it’s time to sail off into the sunset.

One campaign official who spoke with NBC described a perfect storm of impasses for Biden and concerns about his mental fitness, fundraising, and unfavorable polling, with two-thirds of voters thinking he should step aside.

“We have this window, and the White House is just running out the clock, which is so selfish,” a longtime Democratic presidential campaign strategist told NBC. “We’re all waiting around for Joe Biden to f--- up again, which is not a great position to be in.”

“He needs to drop out,” another Biden campaign official told NBC. “He will never recover from this.”

Since his debate performance two weeks ago, Biden has said multiple times he will not leave the race.

“I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024,” Biden most recently wrote in a letter to Democrats on Monday. But nothing has been able to quell growing calls for Biden to step aside. On Wednesday, Politico reported deep blue New York is on the brink of becoming a swing state thanks to lackluster support for Biden, with local candidates being advised to avoid attaching themselves to him.

“I worry that the symbol of our party is the person who’s running for president and that that does absolutely trickle down to the down ballot races,” one state party chair told NBC News.

Despite those concerns, an internal memo to Biden campaign staff asserting that he still has a shot circulated on Thursday.

“Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote. “The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race—while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided.”

“No one is denying that the debate was a setback,” they wrote. “But Joe Biden and this campaign have made it through setbacks before. We are clear eyed about what we need to do to win. And we will win by moving forward, unified as a party, so that every single day between now and election day we focus on defeating Donald Trump.”

It isn’t just Democrats and the rest of the American public: Diplomats and leaders attending the NATO summit are also worried about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness and the increasing likelihood of Trump winning in November.

“It’s a very weird feeling to be in Europe listening to the president of the United States, and you’re more stressed about whether he will go off script than being excited to listen to the leader of the free world,” one senior European diplomat told Politico.  “You’re worried if he knows which direction he’s going or whether he’s going to fall or what he’s going to forget or if he’ll say ‘North Korea’ when he meant ‘South Korea.’ It’s just a weird experience.”

The diplomats that Politico spoke to expressed concern about Trump returning to the White House and overhauling or even ending the alliance, which the former president and convicted felon has repeatedly promised he will do.

“Everyone’s focusing on Biden’s appearance and less on Trump’s statements about NATO,” a senior European diplomat said, also expressing concern about Trump’s age. “He’s not that much younger.”

Another diplomat was more frank.

“He didn’t look good,” the diplomat said about Biden, speaking on the condition of anonymity along with the rest of Politico’s sources within the visiting delegations.

As heads of state arrived on Wednesday for the summit, many faced questions from the media about their thoughts on whether Biden was in a weaker state following his widely panned debate performance from two weeks ago. None gave any clear praise or defense of Biden, instead dodging questions about the president and saying that they would respect America’s political process.

“I’m not going to comment on this topic,” said Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who walked off after speaking for just a few minutes.

While it’s not a campaign event, the summit has been critical for Biden to demonstrate that he can handle himself on the world stage with international leaders, and can thus reassure the public that he is up to another four years as president. But the visiting members of NATO have other, arguably more important concerns.

“All the Americans are looking for at this summit is the photo op of Biden with allies,” one official said. “We’re really concerned that the world will essentially be leaderless for the next several months, and then we don’t know what comes after that.”

President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are equally embarrassing, a new poll has found.

Both candidates were found cringeworthy by 63 percent of respondents, according to the Pew Research Center poll published Thursday. And respondents weren’t just mortified by the other party’s candidate: They seem to have gotten the ick from the candidate they supported, as well.

Thirty-seven percent of responding Biden supporters said that the president was embarrassing, while 33 percent of responding Trump supporters said that the former president was embarrassing. Egg on both their faces, then.

This newest poll comes just two weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and amid a surge of dissent among the Democratic Party, which has grown desperate for the president to prove his mental fitness and ability to triumph over Trump in November.

While Biden wasn’t polling particularly strongly before, none of this has helped his numbers, which continue to trail behind Trump’s.

According to Pew’s poll, in a matchup between Trump and Biden, Trump was favored at 50 percent, while 47 percent supported Biden.

The Biden campaign is surveying voters about a head-to-head matchup between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, The New York Times reports.

Ever since Biden’s disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, a growing number of Democrats have raised questions about the president’s mental fitness and ability to win November’s election against Trump. This move signals that these questions are even being discussed within the campaign itself.

The Times report doesn’t reveal the results of that poll, but a flurry of outside polling reveals that Harris has a slight advantage over Biden in beating Trump in November.

“In addition to what we believe is a clear pathway ahead for us, there is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the president vs. Trump,” a Thursday memo to Biden campaign staff read. “Hypothetical polling of alternative nominees will always be unreliable, and surveys do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic nominee will encounter.”

Biden says that he has no intention of stepping down, and is trying to tamp down calls for his replacement. He is holding a news conference on Thursday evening where he hopes to allay concerns about his age and cognitive state. But this news from his campaign suggests that even in his inner circle, those concerns still exist.

In recent days, several Democrats in Congress have called on Biden to drop out of the race, and Democratic leaders aren’t giving Biden their unconditional support, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Timothy Kaine, and even former President Barack Obama. Celebrities who have campaigned and fundraised for Democrats, like George Clooney, have also called on him to drop out from the race. 

In contrast, Trump and those in his orbit, such as his imprisoned former adviser Steve Bannon, want Biden to stay in the race because they think he is an easier opponent. Some conservative activists are even preparing legal strategies to keep Biden on the ballot in battleground states. At the same time, the Trump team has also put together a playbook in the event Harris does become the Democratic nominee for president.

The poll from the Biden-Harris campaign could be the first step in Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. Some Democrats have already suggested who could be Harris’s running mate. In the end, though, nothing will happen without Biden’s agreement, even as the calls for him to step down grow louder and louder.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin announced Thursday that the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to conduct a review of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, arguing that “Congress cannot turn a blind eye to it.” But the meeting won’t happen until September.

“During this upcoming hearing, we will examine the breadth of future misconduct that may be immunized from prosecution, consider the unprecedented nature of this immunity in American history, and discuss legislative solutions to the dangers of this decision,” Durbin, the committee chairman, said in a statement obtained by HuffPost.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee will not tolerate these justices cherry-picking their way through text and history to impose their own extreme vision of presidential power on the American people,” he said.

Details on the event are scant. The hearing does not yet have a specific date, and names of potential witnesses have not been revealed. It’s unclear what—if any—influence the September hearing will have on the judicial ruling, or if it will even happen in time to have any effect.

The announcement follows a groundswell of calls for increased checks and balances for the nation’s highest court, which has a history of ethics violations and has most recently made several dangerous rulings, stripping executive agencies of their authority and expanding the definition of presidential immunity. That new definition has effectively killed any criminal charges against Donald Trump related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and for his involvement in stoking the January 6 attack his supporters led on the U.S. Capitol.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced impeachment articles against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both of whom have a recorded affinity for accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires. The articles include counts for failing to disclose financial income and gifts, as well counts for refusing to recuse themselves from cases that concerned either their spouse’s legal or financial benefits or their own.