US President Joe Biden reiterated that he will not withdraw from the race for the White House. “I beat Donald Trump,” he said, “and I will beat him a second time. I have a job to do.” In a press conference that lasted almost an hour, at the end of the NATO summit, answering a series of questions from the press, Biden reacted angrily to calls from his own party to step asideafter the disappointing performance in the televised duel with Trump.
There was much anticipation among Americans, and anxiety among Democrats, for Biden’s possible lapses, his lapses, his signs of decline, but there were no disasters, apart from a few lapses, like when confused Kamala Harris with Trump saying that she “chose Trump as vice president because she was convinced that she was qualified to be president” (Yesterday, during the NATO conference, he called Zelensky “Putin”). His opponent took advantage of this to relaunch the passage on Truth, saying “well done Joe”, but the tycoon himself has fallen into a series of gaffes in recent daysin turn confusing names and facts.
Biden wanted to be clear: he will not leave the race, he defined himself as the “most qualified to beat Trump”, he admitted to having made mistakes in the TV duel at the end of June, “but also because I had grueling hours, while Trump spent his time playing golf and keeping score”. Regarding NATO, the president also reiterated that he is the “most qualified to ensure that Ukraine does not fall and can succeed against Russia”, and revealed that the leaders of the allied countries did not ask him not to run, but to win, to “stop the one who is seen as a disaster”.
Biden also recalled that when in 2020 he had defined himself as a ferry candidate, the situation has changed, issuing a warning about “democracy under siege”. The president cited “Project 2025”, the manifesto of the authoritarian turn created by a conservative think tank linked to Trump, and whose name appears in the text more than three hundred times. In the end, Biden was able to provide clear and direct answers, avoiding disasters and providing the image of a solid commander in foreign policy. On Russia, he said he “has no good reason to talk” with Russian President Vladimir Putin “until he changes his attitude”, he recalled that “he will not kneel to Putin”, and warned China that helping Moscow in the war with Ukraine “will not bring economic benefits as consequences”.
In the most problematic passage, the one in which he confused Harris with Trump, Biden promoted his vice president, considered by many to be his possible replacement, calling her “qualified from the very first moment to be president”.
Has Biden passed the test? Has he stopped the hemorrhage of consensus within the party, among the Democrats in Congress? We will see in the next few hours, even if it seems difficult: at least fourteen Democrats in Congress have publicly asked him to step aside. But in the meantime the comments on the major American networks, from CNN to MSNBC, and in the New York Times, TV and newspapers that had supported Biden’s withdrawal from the race, have been positive.
The president appeared more aggressive than expected and more lucid, even if he remains a tired 81-year-old man, with a very complex task: leading the most powerful country in the world, a role that leaves no room for rest. The fact that Trump’s campaign staked everything on a gaffe was interpreted by American commentators as a sign that Biden was not as disastrous as his opponents, internal and external, had hoped.