President Joe Biden will hold a news conference Thursday to close out the NATO summit in Washington, the key event in a monumental week during which the Democratic incumbent is fending off calls for him to step aside as the party's presumptive nominee following a shaky debate performance.
It's just the type of event that many political watchers have said Biden needs to pull off successfully to turn back demands — including from within his own party — that he withdraw from his reelection battle against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Biden has argued that he had a singularly bad night in Atlanta and that it wasn't representative of his mental acuity. A strong performance Thursday could convince members of his party that he still has the ability both to win in November and to serve a second term.
A weak effort — or stumbles similar to his debate performances — could make the calls for him to withdraw grow much louder.
Here's what you need to know about the event and how to watch:
Biden is scheduled to take questions at 6:30 p.m. Biden will be speaking from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, a short distance from the White House, where many events of the ongoing NATO summit are being held.
Spectrum News will provide live coverage of the event on Spectrum News+ and your local Spectrum News station.
Probably!
CNN reported that 51 million people watched the Atlanta debate, which was in primetime, while more than 8 million people tuned in to watch Biden's ABC News interview live. If networks break into their daily coverage or cable channels carry it live, that will guarantee a significant number of eyes on Biden.
That's not set in stone, and there's not a ton of precedent.
Biden hasn’t held very many news conferences that aren’t tied to a foreign leader’s visit or trips abroad. Typically, those are what’s known in the business as a “2+2,” meaning two reporters from the U.S. and two foreign reporters ask questions.
Biden returns to the campaign trail with a trip to Michigan Friday. He will also do an interview with NBC on Monday.
Biden's stamina and effectiveness are under the microscope like never before and he's struggling to quell the Democratic Party's panic about his chances this November.
By many metrics, from job growth and major legislation to the expanded transatlantic alliance, Biden can point to successes during his tenure in office. But where he has sometimes failed — spectacularly, in the case of the debate — is at a defining part of the role that isn’t in the official job description: delivering inspiring oratory that commands the attention and respect of the nation.
Biden has tried to step up his performance since the debate but his follow-up interview on ABC News last week did not do much to quell the panic. Nothing he's tried seems to be stopping the bleeding, with more lawmakers calling for him to bow out in the face of concerns that he could hand the White House back to Trump.
Americans tend to regard their leaders less for what they do than how they make them feel, and Biden's debate disaster has shaken his party to its core.
“The debate was a reminder that you can have as many policies as you want, but what the public sees and hears might matter more,” said Julian Zelizer, the Princeton presidential historian.
Rhetoric is intertwined with the modern presidency, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” to Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
It can inspire in the wake of tragedy, like George W. Bush’s bullhorn speech on the smoky rubble at Ground Zero and help a war- and recession-weary country recover its sense of self, like Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” Even Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” cry echoed the temperament of the agitated nation.
“People saw Trump as a reflection of a more turbulent, chaotic and angry country,” Zelizer said. “Voters may see Biden’s frailty as a symbol of weakness or its own kind of instability.”
Biden can give a good speech — his State of the Union address earlier this year helped quiet doubters about his viability as a candidate. But his strength as a president and politician has been how his humanity in intimate settings resonated with voters, and the power of his personal narrative and down-to-earth roots.
Yet those moments, in private or before small crowds, even if amplified on social media as Biden's team hopes, are certain to reach fewer people than the tens of millions who watched his bout with Trump.
Despite a drumbeat of calls from some in his party to step aside, Biden has dug in, insisting he's the best Democrat to defeat Trump, whose candidacy he's called an existential threat to democracy.
His press conference will be closely watched for his ability to think on his feet, to demonstrate dynamism and to articulate both that he is still capable of doing the job and of winning it once more.
Even before the debate, Biden's victories as president have often come despite his inability to sell them to a skeptical public. Heading into his face-off with Trump he has historically low job approval ratings for an American leader. And he's been unable to overcome voters’ pessimism over the direction of the country and a majority of voters in his own party had already believed him too old to effectively lead the country.
The debate, rather than helping Biden reset the race against Trump, confirmed voters' preestablished fears about him, said Allison Prasch, a professor of rhetoric who researches presidential communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“The president is a symbol,” she said, adding that Americans often look to the president as a mirror to reflect on their hopes and their fears.
Biden aides and allies responded to the debate with a series of public pronouncements defending Biden’s mental state and fitness for the job, notably focused on the big decisions of the Oval Office, rather than his ability to articulate them to the masses.
“I have not seen any reason whatsoever to question or doubt his lucidity, his grasp of context, his probing nature, and the degree to which he is completely in charge of facts and figures,” White House National Security spokesman John Kirby said Monday.
Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa and a veteran of four administrations, said he has never been concerned about Biden’s decision-making.
Speaking of Biden, he told The Associated Press: “I have never seen a president who is not prepared, who is not deliberate, who is not asking rigorous questions of those in the room or of a foreign leader,” adding that Biden “makes decisions sometimes which are often difficult decisions, and then actually follows up.”
In an interview with Spectrum News earlier this month, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a a former primary rival of Joe Biden’s in 2020-turned-ally and Cabinet official, called the Democratic president a “focused and disciplined leader."
When asked about his message to people who are worried about Biden’s age — he would be 86 at the end of a second term — and fitness to govern, Buttigieg hailed the results the incumbent Democrat has been able to achieve in his first term.
“The president, the boss that I work for, is a focused and disciplined leader, and you can tell from the results that we've gotten,” Buttigieg told Spectrum News’ Taylor Popielarz in an exclusive interview in North Carolina. “No modern president has been able to deliver as many achievements as he did really in his first two years alone, including, of course, this historic [$1.2T bipartisan] infrastructure package, but also the legislation bringing manufacturing jobs back to places like where I grew up in northern Indiana, the benefits for veterans, the reduction in the cost of insulin, you name it.”
When asked about Biden's demeanor behind closed doors, Buttigieg said that "it's a lot like what America saw on the night of the State of the Union address," a speech which garnered the incumbent a lot of praise for his energy and willingness to joust with Republican hecklers.
"You've got a leader who's very focused, knows what he cares about, holds everybody who works for him, all of us, to a very high standard and is focused on getting things done, not the noise, the chaos, the divisiveness, but bringing people together," Buttigieg said.
While Biden and his team have made a concerted effort since the debate to increase his public visibility — which had been limited by aides worried about Biden's penchant for gaffes or missteps — he has proven to be uneven and at times underwhelming.
Campaigning in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Biden delivered remarks for less than 10 minutes at a Philadelphia church and a Harrisburg rally, but spent three times as long taking selfies and hugging kids — the sort of feel-good content that has always bolstered his political fortunes.
A call-in interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” showcased Biden's defiance and distaste of party “elites” as he pledged to stay in the race. In his opening remarks at the NATO summit, Biden was forceful in defense of the alliance.
“The more he gets out there to campaign with voters, the starker the contrast and easier the choice will be for these voters: between Joe Biden, a decent man fighting for the middle class and an unhinged billionaire like Trump who wants to terminate the ACA and turn our country into a dictatorship,” said campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz, referring in part to the Affordable Care Act.
But asked in the ABC interview about how he would feel if his candidacy handed the White House back to Trump, he offered a mangled and less-than-inspiring response: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”