Some users have recently uploaded old videos of Joe Biden to social media. They show the still-president of the United States passionately debating Donald Trump in 2020; responding firmly to the press in interviews and even showing reflexes when receiving friendly fire from other Democrats. For a man with five decades of experience, there are many moments to choose from in the archives. They are moments that contrast sharply with the idea that currently persists in the electorate; a hesitant leader, with increasingly common mistakes in his public appearances and who frequently loses his train of thought. This led voters of his party to lose enthusiasm for their candidate. A poll published by AP this week indicated that almost two-thirds of Democrats wanted to see Biden, 81, drop out of the race. The president gave in to pressure on Sunday.
In what is already the last event of his campaign, Biden showed strength and vigor in a meeting with African-American voters, a key sector of his electorate. In Las Vegas, a city that he left on Wednesday infected with Covid, the president recalled what the Trump Administration meant for black people. “It was hell,” said Biden in a speech of just under 30 minutes where he tried not to go off-script or deviate from the teleprompterThe result after the appearance was positive, until he left Nevada, one of the seven swing states, forced by the illness.
June 27 will go down in history as the date that tipped the balance against Biden. The president participated that night in Atlanta in the first presidential debate of the cycle. The confrontation with the Republican candidate offered viewers 90 minutes of a sad spectacle. The president spoke with a weak voice. His participation was full of disjointed phrases, gaps and moments where he seemed to go blank. “I don’t even know what he said at the end of that sentence and I don’t think even he knows it,” Trump responded at a moment when they were discussing the immigration crisis. That meeting left few memorable moments for the Democratic candidate. One of them was about golf.
The campaign tried to move forward by raising Biden’s profile. To wash away the bitter taste of the debate, his team agreed to more interviews. ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos was the first to question Biden. Biden ruled out dropping out of the race unless the “Lord Almighty” intervened. Five days after the interview, Stephanopoulos told a man who asked him how he had seen Biden that the president was “not fit to serve four more years.”
The White House insisted on the strategy. Interviews followed with NBC, Univision, Internet celebrity Speedy Morman and Black Entertainment Television (BET). In the latter, recorded this week, the president appears to forget the name of his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, whom he refers to only as “the black man.” The American press reported in the middle of this month that the campaign team requested to edit an interview that Biden gave to a Wisconsin radio station.
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Biden held a press conference on July 11 to show his mental agility. The event, which seemed routine, aroused great interest. Nearly 25 million people tuned in to the press conference organized around the NATO summit. The day had not started well for the president, who confused the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. In the first question, he made a mistake again by referring to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.” The Republicans put their finger on the sore spot and flooded the networks with the video. “Well done, Joe!” wrote Trump on Truth Social.
The red flags or warning signs about Biden’s deteriorating capabilities were there before. In February, the executive leader had another lapse at a rally in which he pulled from memory to recall an anecdote at a G7 summit held in England in 2021. In recounting it, however, the executive leader confused his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, with François Mitterrand, who died in 1996.
A couple of days after that, Biden mixed up the leaders of Egypt and Mexico during a news conference. The mix-up might have gone largely unnoticed, except that it occurred at a public appearance arranged for the president to refute a 300-page report by the attorney general that portrayed him as an octogenarian with serious gaps in his memory.
“Mr. Biden’s memory appears to have significant limitations,” said the document, drafted by Robert Hur, a prosecutor during the Trump era. The document states that the president does not remember the date he finished his term as Barack Obama’s vice president, had forgotten the important speech on Afghanistan and that he cannot even determine exactly when his son Beau died. Something that Biden himself strongly denied. “How the hell dare he? I don’t need anyone to remind me when my son died,” he said.
At other times, Biden has been taken out of context. The bad faith of social media and the age of misinformation have helped magnify the idea of the president’s deterioration. In a video that went viral from the most recent G-7 summit in Italy, cameras capture Biden, who wanders and looks disoriented, as he looks in the opposite direction to his counterparts. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni goes to find him to join the group. The White House denied the reports and clarified that the president was actually greeting a group of paratroopers who were out of the frame. The moment can be seen in an official video that was not edited.
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