Biden’s re-election bid at stake with news conference that will be a test of his cognitive ability

If all goes well at this Thursday’s news conference, U.S. President Joe Biden, 81, will be able to prove that he is capable of giving a news conference. What seems less clear is whether answering questions from journalists for a while without reading the answers on a screen will serve to convince Americans that he is fit to face a hypothetical second four-year term in office. Biden’s own campaign has presented the occasion as a momentous event. The risk, of course, is that this live cognitive ability test could go wrong. And in that case, the pressure for Biden to withdraw would be unbearable.

Biden has answered some questions in short joint appearances due to visits by foreign leaders. On the other hand, he has not given a full-fledged news conference since November 2022, when he spoke at the White House after the mid-term elections. The Democratic Party achieved a better-than-expected result, and Biden proclaimed: “It has been a good day for democracy and a good day for America.” At that time, the president had not yet decided whether he would run for re-election.

On Thursday he will speak from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, where the NATO summit is being held this week. Biden is proud of the leadership he has exercised in the Atlantic Alliance in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Despite this context, Biden will have to face questions that have nothing to do with foreign policy, but rather with the growing political, media and financial pressure for him to bow out of the race for re-election.

The president and his team had built a dam to contain all the doubts related to his age, his physical condition and his mental acuity. Medical reports, gestures, jokes, complicity and limited exposure to improvisation had done the job. But with the disastrous CNN debate in Atlanta on June 27 against Donald Trump, enormous cracks opened in that dam, which at times feels on the verge of bursting.

Biden has tried to plug the holes, but new cracks are appearing all the time. For the media, reporting on his potential replacements has become a priority. That in itself doesn’t help. Nor does the aggressive position that the leading progressive newspaper, The New York Times, has adopted against Biden, with two editorials asking him to resign, dozens of opinion articles expressing similar views, and hundreds of articles going over the crisis from every possible angle.

On Wednesday, the president received one of the most devastating blows in the form of a guest essay in The New York Times written by George Clooney. The Hollywood star who had shown so much admiration for the president has decided to turn his back on him. “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced. But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” wrote the actor.

“Last month I co-hosted the single largest fund-raiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, for President Biden’s re-election,” wrote Clooney. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate. Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw.” The article ends with an entreaty: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”

First Democratic senator to ask Biden to step aside

This is a recurring argument. The image that Biden left at the debate is not going to go away just because he later gives an interview without major mistakes or holds a press conference at the NATO summit. “We cannot unsee President Biden’s disastrous debate performance. We cannot ignore or dismiss the valid questions raised since that night,” reads an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Peter Welch, the first Democratic senator to openly ask him to withdraw from the race.

“I understand why President Biden wants to run. He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not,” Welch continues.

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, participated in the national conversation about Biden’s ability this Wednesday in a somewhat confusing way. In a television interview with MSNBC, she praised Biden, but also left the following message: “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to to make that decision. Because time is running short.”

Welch is the first Democratic senator to openly call on Biden to step down. Until now, House Democrats had done so, in a list that continues to grow and which was joined on Wednesday by Pat Ryan from New York and Earl Blumenauer from Oregon. There are only a dozen — out of a total of more than 200 representatives — who have openly spoken against Biden’s candidacy. It is assumed that many others prefer not to demonstrate in public against the president. At the same time, many have shown determined support for him.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has had to answer questions about whether Biden has Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or cognitive impairment of any kind. The White House has denied that the Cabinet is considering removing the president due to a disability. The president has a theoretical appointment with Donald Trump for a new debate on September 10, but the Republican presumptive nominee is busy picking at the wound: “So tonight, I’m officially offering Joe the chance to redeem himself in front of the entire world,” he said. on Tuesday at a rally in Doral (Florida). “Let’s do another debate this week — so that Sleepy Joe Biden can prove to everyone all over the world that he has what it takes to be president. But this time it will be man to man. No moderators, no holds barred,” he added.

Biden himself pointed to the NATO summit as a good time to demonstrate his capabilities. “I guess a real good way to judge me is you’re going to have now the NATO Conference here in the United States next week. Come listen. See what they say,” he said last week in an ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos.

At that interview he was asked if he would be willing to undergo an independent cognitive evaluation to certify his mental acuity. “I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world. It sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.”

On Thursday, he will face several of those tests. There is the news conference (5.30 pm Eastern time) where no stumbles, neither physical nor dialectical, will be allowed. That will come after a day with a packed agenda that includes two working sessions of the NATO summit, a bilateral one with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and another event in support of Ukraine.

The president told governors a few days ago that he wanted to limit the number of events held past 8 pm so he could get better rest. On Wednesday, however, he broke that rule by receiving the heads of state and government of the countries participating in the NATO summit at the White House. Biden, a declared teetotaler, even toasted with a Roederer Estate Brut Rosé, a sparkling wine from Mendocino (California). On Thursday the world will see whether staying up late has taken its toll on him.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition