(Washington) After Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the Democratic camp is urging the American president to be “honest” about his state of health, and questions are mounting about the responsibility of his close guard.
“We have to be honest with ourselves that this was not just a horrible night,” House Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, told CNN on Tuesday.
“People want to be sure that […] “The president and his team are honest with us about his condition” and that Thursday’s debate “was really an anomaly,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said Monday on local channel WPRI-TV.
The Rhode Island Democrat said he was “horrified” by the confrontation with the former Republican president, during which Joe Biden appeared very confused, and at times completely lost.
Since then, the American president has not given a live interview or press conference, which would force him, as during the 90 minutes facing his Republican rival on CNN, to speak without a safety net and without a teleprompter.
On Monday, at the end of a very short speech about a Supreme Court decision, a reporter asked him if he planned to withdraw from the race for the White House. The American president turned on his heel and left the room without answering.
“Cowards”
Questions are flying about the responsibility of the 81-year-old Democrat’s inner circle, namely a few long-time advisers such as Ron Klain, Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon, and his wife Jill Biden.
The sometimes almost arrogant attitude of the Biden camp, which evokes a “cowardly brigade” in response to calls to withdraw its candidacy, gets on Democrats’ nerves.
Polls are struggling to separate the president from his Republican predecessor. By calling for a debate as early as June, Joe Biden hoped to finally gain momentum against Donald Trump.
“I blame the campaign for brushing aside the questions that people are asking,” said Senator Peter Welch. In an interview with the website Semafor, published Tuesday, the Vermont Democrat called for a “reality check.”
Recent articles, particularly from Axios and Politico, have suggested that the president would only be fully functional between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and would only read notes written to avoid any annoyance.
Since his election, the oldest president in US history has undeniably lost his oral and physical ease.
So far, the White House has consistently dismissed all questions about Joe Biden’s intellectual acuity, sometimes with marked irritation.
” Decline ”
A recent survey by Wall Street Journal reporting a “decline” of the octogenarian earned the newspaper a wave of particularly harsh criticism from its communications team.
For several months now, the American president, who has fallen in public on several occasions, has not used the large gangway of his plane, preferring a shorter and more stable staircase.
For several weeks, he has also surrounded himself with advisers to go from the White House to his helicopter on the lawn, which avoids long camera shots of his very stiff gait.
The US president, who has always been prone to gaffes, has not given a long press conference since January 2022 and has reduced the number of impromptu exchanges with journalists.
The Democrat spends almost every weekend at one of his Delaware homes, with no official schedule.
When Joe Biden recently visited France for the commemorations of the Allied landings of 1944, he went straight from the airport to his hotel, where he remained locked up for a whole day, without any public appearance.