Biden Press Conference Ends in Total Chaos After Question on Kamala

President Joe Biden on Thursday ended a defiant press conference with a strange qualifier on his personal commitment to staying in the presidential race.

When asked directly whether he would consider withdrawing if polling numbers indicated Vice President Kamala Harris would fare better in a matchup against Donald Trump, the 81-year-old president said no, with one caveat.

“You earlier explained confidence in your vice president. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?” a Scripps reporter asked.

“No, unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win,’” Biden said, adding “… me.”

“And no one’s saying that. No polls are saying that,” he added in a whisper, launching the room filled with the White House press corps into chaos. It was the last question of one of the most critical evenings of Biden’s presidency, as Democratic lawmakers weigh whether to formally strip their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Despite Biden’s insistence, national polls have shown Harris faring as well or better than him in a direct matchup against Trump in November.

Following a two-hour delay to the beginning of his first major press conference in recent memory, President Joe Biden flubbed almost as soon as he finished reading off the teleprompter.

Responding to a question Thursday about NATO’s reaction to Biden’s increasingly unsteady future in U.S. politics, the 81-year-old president stumbled over the names of who his vice president, and his major opponent, really were.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, mistakenly referring to Donald Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Why did he call President Trump the Vice President?” asked the official X account of the House GOP moments after the verbal slip.

On Thursday, MSNBC dug up a clip from 2022 of Trump expressing some pretty convincing familiarity with the people behind Project 2025—and potentially hinting at knowing that the document was in the works.

“Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heridges to [sic] lay the groundwork,” Trump stumbled. “And Heridges does such an incredible job at that,” Trump added, stumbling again.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming,” Trump said, seeming to imply Project 2025.

The comments were made during an April 2022 keynote speech by Trump at a Heritage Foundation event where he was introduced by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In that speech, he praised Heritage Board Chairman Barb Van Andel-Gaby as well as Heritage fellows Tom Homan and Mark Morgan—all of whom he now claims he doesn’t know at all.

“Already we have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage over the four incredible years that we’ve worked with you a lot, and we were just discussing it with Kevin,” Trump said during the 2022 speech in his typical rambling style. “They’re going to work on some other things that are going to be very exciting, I think, Kevin, I think maybe the most exciting of all.”

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump claimed late Wednesday night. Trump issued his first denial of Project 2025 last Friday, declaring to closed ears, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

CNN found nearly 140 former Trump aides and advisers who have contributed to Project 2025, including six former members of his Cabinet, four of his ambassadors, and Republican National Committee members appointed to their positions in coordination with the Trump campaign. The document functions as a sort of light-speed roadmap for an impending Republican presidency, laying pathways to actualize Trump’s mass deportation plan, consolidate federal agency power, and dismantle LGBTQ+ and abortion rights. Trump has tried in vain to distance himself from Project 2025 and its patently extreme agenda, presumably hoping to woo voters with softer stances before flipping once elected. Either Trump is struggling with a pretty sizable memory lapse, or he’s lying.

It may become easier than ever before to lock and load guns in the United States, a country plagued by gun violence, thanks to a small business keen on selling bullets in possibly the simplest way imaginable: a vending machine.

American Rounds LLC currently has its bullet vending machine operations in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, though the company has plans to expand to several other states. The Dallas-based company claims that its “automated ammo retail machines” utilize artificial intelligence to ensure potential buyers are of legal purchasing age. The one-stop drop shops can be found in eight different supermarkets across the trio of Southern states.

“As a company our team are supporters of law abiding responsible gun ownership,” said Grant Magers, CEO of American Rounds, in an email to Gizmodo. “We believe in the second amendment and that … a safe and secure method to sell ammunition is needed in the market.”

Magers told NPR in a separate statement that the ammo supply company intends to open another vending machine in Colorado this week and has had “requests” to bring their services to Hawaii, Alaska, California, Florida, and “every state in between for the most part.”

“We have currently about 200 grocery stores that we’re working on fulfilling orders on machines for,” Magers told the radio network.

American Rounds is of the belief that its service is safer than the traditional method of ammunition sales, which typically sees boxes stocked on shelves in gun stores or big-box stores, such as Walmart or Cabela’s. But selling just ammunition requires very little government oversight: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives does not require someone to obtain a federal license in order to sell bullets, and only a handful of states have passed laws necessitating background checks for their sale or purchase.

“If you look at the way it is currently sold in our country, we are the safest and most secure method of ammo retail sales on the market today,” Magers said, noting the machines also prevent underage customers from simply stealing boxes of bullets.

Critics of the easy-access machines argue that American Rounds isn’t providing any solutions that aren’t already presented by traditional gun retailers, who have the added ability to research whether someone’s criminal convictions prohibit them from buying ammunition, as well as assess a buyer’s mental and emotional state.

“A vending machine is not going to be able to say, ‘Hey are you OK?’ or ‘Why do you need this ammunition?’” George Tita, a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine, told NPR.

Against the background of expanding weapons access, gun violence in the United States has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent. In the first half of the year, 287 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 301 people and injured another 1,261, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.

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.”