Biden’s Team Is “Freaking the F*** Out” Over Debate Performance

President Joe Biden’s performance at last week’s debate has induced a maelstrom among aides and officials in the White House and on his campaign, with several administration figures reportedly “freaking the fuck out,” according to Axios.

“It’s the first topic of every conversation,” one White House official told the publication. “Senior leadership has given us nothing. To act like it’s business as usual is delusional.”

The debate was a critical moment for not just Biden’s 2024 candidacy but also his current presidency. Over 90 minutes, what was intended to be a showcase of Donald Trump’s extremism in contrast to Biden devolved into a one-sided train wreck, with Biden unable to string more than a few words together before getting steamrolled by an assertive and comparatively alive Trump.

In the aftermath, aides told Axios that they felt that they were handed empty talking points, with no confident explanations for why Biden appeared so weak and unwell during the debate. As the days drag on, that confusion has morphed into anger and resentment among a swathe of Biden’s employees, with one official involved in the campaign describing the atmosphere as “dark.”

“It feels like there is zero leadership or information,” the anonymous staffer told Axios. “People are being told to keep their heads down and keep working, but they’re not seeing the president or being given any reason why they should have faith in him.”

That feeling was shared in the White House, with one unnamed official telling Axios that “people are looking for leadership and direction that they were told to trust, and hoped was there, but aren’t yet feeling, in what is now clearly a defining moment for this presidency.”

Executive branch employees aren’t the only ones losing sight of the light in the Biden administration. On Tuesday alone, several prominent Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have signaled it may be time for Biden to remove himself from the race. Representative Jim Clyburn, whose 2020 endorsement helped Biden secure his last nomination, announced his support for Vice President Kamala Harris to take the reins “if [Biden] were to step aside,” and Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett became the first House member to formally call on Biden to withdraw from the race.

A new leaked poll shows support for President Joe Biden plummeting in key battleground states around the country in the wake of his disastrous debate performance on Thursday.

Puck News gained access to an internal Democratic polling memo conducted 72 hours after the debate, and it’s bad: Several states that were considered solidly blue are now competitive for Donald Trump, including Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico. Plus, other Democrats, such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, are polling better than Biden in head-to-head matchups with the convicted felon and former president.

The polling came from OpenLabs, a nonprofit specializing in polling for Democratic organizations, and found that 40 percent of 2020 Biden voters now think the president should step aside, an increase from about 25 percent in May. Swing voters believe Biden should drop out by a 2-to-1 margin.

Democrats and Trump opponents may take solace in the fact that Biden only dropped in national head-to-head polling with Trump by 0.08 points. However, in battleground states, Biden is performing much worse. For example, Biden trails Trump by seven points in Pennsylvania, compared to five points before the debate. He also is behind Trump in Michigan (seven points), Georgia (10 points), and Nevada (nine points).

While this is only one poll, conducted immediately after the debate, it reportedly has been circulating in Democratic circles, and may be a factor behind the worries being openly expressed by top Democrats. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Biden’s mental condition was a “legitimate concern” on Tuesday, and one of the longest serving Democrats in the House, Representative Lloyd Doggett, has even called for Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.

Can the Biden campaign right the ship and restore calm? ProPublica released an unedited September interview with the president that shows him alert and mentally fit, and Biden also appeared to be lucid and sharp in a North Carolina rally on Friday. He will need more positive counterexamples like those two, as well as a better performance at September’s presidential debate in order to assuage concerns not just from top Democrats, but also voters across the political spectrum.  

A new report by The New York Times paints a damning picture of Joe Biden’s mental and physical state in the weeks leading up to last week’s debate.

Times reporters who spoke with insiders close to the administration and the campaign revealed that Biden has appeared “confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations” over the past few months, even as he’s been “sharp and engaged most of the time.”

Republicans have ramped up attacks on Biden’s age and fitness with edited videos of Biden appearing to freeze, disoriented, at several public events, including a D-Day commemoration at Normandy, a Juneteenth celebration, and diplomatic meetings across Europe. The Biden campaign dismissed these videos as “cheap fakes.” But it’s now clear that Biden’s condition, punctuated by his poor debate performance, alarmed many before he took the stage.

According to the Times, Biden’s European trips were a mixed bag of “moments of sharpness … including a complex session on diverting income from Russian assets to aid Ukraine’’ and “occasional blank-stared confusion.” But European officials were reportedly “shocked” by a “noticeable decline in Mr. Biden’s physical state since the previous fall” and observed that he appeared “out of it.” European leaders at the G7 summit are reported to have held private conversations about Biden’s condition, and one former official is said to have expressed doubt about Biden’s ability to handle an adversary like Vladimir Putin.

But the most shocking revelation in the report concerns Biden’s debate preparation. According to the Times, prep meetings began no earlier than 11 a.m., and included time for a daily nap. Biden surrogates have blamed his performance on bad strategy, calling him “over-coached” and “over-practiced.”

As the campaign digs its heels in against those questioning the president’s fitness, any evidence that the debate was not an outlier but an alarmingly common occurrence will feed the increasingly strident calls for Biden to withdraw from the race.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a strange reaction to a phenomenally dark set of accusations that emerged Tuesday, seemingly lending credibility to a sexual assault allegation against him by a former employee, while attempting to shoo off the idea that he had chowed down on a dead dog in 2010.

During an interview on Breaking Points, host Saagar Enjeti asked the independent presidential candidate about a photograph of Kennedy posing with what appeared to be a barbecued dog.

“The article is a lot of garbage,” Kennedy said, referring to a Vanity Fair exposé, which published the image. The photo caption mentioned Kennedy recently texted the image to a friend with a message that he should try dog on a visit to Korea. “The picture that they said is of me eating a dog is actually me eating a goat in Patagonia on a white water trip many years ago.

“They say they have an expert that has identified that as a dog carcass. It’s just not true.”

Vanity Fair said a veterinarian examined the photograph and identified the carcass as a dog’s due to its 13 pairs of ribs, including a telltale pair of “floating ribs” that dogs have. Goats also have 13 pairs of ribs, with two pairs of floating ribs.

But that wasn’t the only strange allegation Enjeti pushed Kennedy on. The host also wanted answers to circulating rumors about the politician allegedly sexually assaulting a former family babysitter in 1998, when Kennedy was 45 and the babysitter was 23.

“In terms of the other allegations, listen, I have said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy. I am not running like that,” Kennedy continued. “I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote I could run for king of the world.

“So, Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories, and I’m not going to comment on the details of any of them,” Kennedy said, refusing an opportunity to elaborate further on the allegations.

The former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, accused Kennedy of rubbing her leg, reading her diary, asking her to rub lotion on his back, and trapping her in the pantry and groping her, all on separate occasions. Some of Kennedy’s friends also told Vanity Fair that he had sent them photographs of nude women multiple times. The friends believed Kennedy had taken the pictures himself but did not know if the women had consented to being photographed or of the images being shared.

Representative Jim Clyburn, whose 2020 primary endorsement paved the way for Joe Biden to lock up the Democratic nomination for president, says he would support Vice President Kamala Harris if Biden were to step aside in November’s election.

Clyburn, a 2024 Biden-Harris campaign co-chair, expressed his support for Harris on MSNBC Tuesday, defending her role in the White House and the Democratic Party.

“I will support her if he were to step aside,” Clyburn told Andrea Mitchell. “I want this ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris, and then we’ll see what happens after the next election.… No. This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”

Is Clyburn alluding to the possibility of Biden being replaced? Whether he is or isn’t, the South Carolina Democrat stressed that Harris should not be bypassed or replaced with anyone else, which could determine what happens with Biden’s status on the Democratic ticket. Clyburn was very much the Democratic kingmaker in 2020, as his endorsement led to Biden winning South Carolina. His endorsement would be critical to any would-be Democratic replacement in the next few months.

Clyburn’s cryptic statement joins less vague rhetoric from other prominent Democrats who worry about whether Biden will have enough support to defeat Donald Trump. Notably, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed those fears on Tuesday, and Representative Lloyd Doggett, a 15-term congressman, even called for Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.

Meanwhile, Biden plans to speak with Democratic governors from across the country in a private phone call to try and allay their concerns, likely on Wednesday, which would be two days after governors discussed Biden in a phone call among themselves. Right now, the mood within the Democratic Party is tense and anxious, with even former President Barack Obama being unable to calm the party faithful.

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money case on Tuesday postponed his sentencing until September 18, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to grant sweeping immunity to the former president.

“The Court’s decision will be rendered off calendar on September 6, 2024, and the matter is adjourned to September 18, 2024 at 10:00 AM for the imposition of sentence, if such is still necessary, or other proceedings,” New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan wrote in a letter.

It seems that Merchan is no longer certain that Trump’s sentencing for his 34 felony count conviction will ever come to pass. The sentencing hearing was originally scheduled for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention.

On Monday, Trump’s lawyers submitted a pre-motion letter requesting that the former president’s guilty verdict be set aside and his sentencing delayed, just hours after the ruling in Trump v. United States, which determined that Trump could not face legal action over his official conduct as president.

Although many of the actions entered into evidence in Trump’s hush-money trial took place before he won the White House, his legal team said that some of his communications with fixer Michael Cohen would have been thrown out or redacted under the new rule. Merchan had previously rejected a similar motion in April, calling it “untimely.”

Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments Cohen had made to keep adult film actress Stormy Daniels quiet about an affair she’d had with Trump ahead of the 2016 presidential elections. Trump’s legal team hoped Monday to brief Merchan on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on his guilty verdict.

The next day, prosecutors for the case wrote that they did not oppose delaying the sentence.

“Although we believe defendant’s arguments to be without merit, we do not oppose his request for leave to file and his putative request to adjourn sentencing pending determination of his motion,” prosecutors wrote in a letter to Merchan.

It’s still unclear whether the results of the immunity decision will result in Trump’s trial being thrown out. Now Trump’s lawyers will have more than two months to prove that Merchan was wrong to reject their first motion on the grounds that it was untimely, that the evidence on which Trump was convicted constituted official acts as president, and that the prosecutors were wrong to use that evidence to convict him.

This story has been updated.

Concern over Joe Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump in November amid questions about his age and mental fitness have already reached a fever pitch across the liberal media, with columnists and editors with the campaign’s ear exhorting the president to step aside. But now members of Biden’s own party, including those at the very top, are following suit in voicing their worry after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. The latest, and most notable so far, is Nancy Pelosi.

The former speaker of the House did not give a ringing endorsement of Biden when asked by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Tuesday. Though she lauded the Biden administration’s achievements during his term, she also echoed fears about Biden’s condition during the debate.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’” she said. “When people ask that question, it’s legitimate.”

Pelosi went on to suggest that both Biden and Trump should take mental fitness tests. “Both candidates owe whatever test you want to put them to, in terms of their mental acuity and their health—both of them,” she said.

The 84-year-old California representative is not the first elected Democrat to acknowledge the questions swirling around Biden’s candidacy, or even the loudest voice to do so—Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett called for Biden to withdraw from the race Tuesday—but she, along with South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, who was essential to Biden’s winning the Democratic nomination in 2020, is the highest-profile member of a growing chorus questioning Biden’s stamina in a race against Trump. Postdebate polls, including Democratic internal polling, show Biden behind Trump nationally, as well as in key swing states.

The Biden campaign responded to the initial swell of postdebate criticism by decrying the “bedwetting brigade.” But now, with Democratic governors holding a private phone call to express their worry, prominent party members like Pelosi and Clyburn publicly equivocating, and the urgency of messaging and energetic campaigning growing with each Supreme Court decision, it’s clear that Biden’s campaign can no longer afford to dismiss the issue.

It’s official: Representative Lloyd Doggett is the first Democratic lawmaker to call for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, after his disastrous appearance at a CNN debate last week.

In a statement Tuesday, the Texas Democrat lauded Biden for taking over after the “wreckage” of Donald Trump’s presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic but said that “for more than a year, many Americans have indicated dissatisfaction with their choices in this election.

“President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump,” Doggett said. “I had hoped that the debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.

“Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang,” he continued, noting that the Supreme Court had only the day before created a “law-free zone around the President.”

“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

Doggett referred to President Lyndon Johnson, who “made the painful decision to withdraw” from the 1968 election due to his waning popularity against Richard Nixon. “President Biden should do the same,” Doggett said.

Biden’s lackluster performance at last week’s presidential debate, in which he gave lengthy, often incoherent answers and repeatedly failed to refute Trump’s dangerously inaccurate claims, has created growing waves of dissent throughout the previously united Democratic Party. In the debate’s wake, Democrats have started pushing for Biden to step aside, so that a younger candidate can take up the mantle of securing the White House.

This dissent may only continue to grow among Democratic lawmakers. While the Biden campaign has rushed to assure donors and activists that the president is still up for the task of defeating Trump, there has been little outreach to the Democrats on Capitol Hill, according to Politico.

Democratic Senate hopeful Tim Ryan, who previously served in the House of Representatives from 2003 to 2023, also called Tuesday for the president to withdraw from the presidential race. Unlike Doggett, he made a pitch for who should replace Biden: Vice President Kamala Harris.

“We have to rip the band aid off! Too much is at stake,” Ryan wrote in a post on X, sharing the link to a Newsweek opinion piece arguing for Harris’s candidacy. Ryan also shared a link to a new CNN poll that found that Harris was polling slightly better than Biden against Trump.

Representative James Clyburn said during an interview on MSNBC Tuesday that he would also support Harris if Biden “were to step aside.” While Clyburn did not call for the president to withdraw from the race, his comment might mark a significant defection from the South Carolina Democrat, whose endorsement was something of a linchpin for Biden’s nomination in 2020.

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and New York City’s former mayor, is now a former practicing attorney. He was disbarred by the state of New York Tuesday.  

Giuliani is “disbarred from the practice of law, effective immediately, and until the further order of this Court, and his name stricken from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law in the State of New York,” ruled a New York appeals court, citing his many false statements about the 2020 presidential election.

“The seriousness of respondent’s misconduct cannot be overstated,” the court wrote. “[Giuliani] flagrantly misused his prominent position as the personal attorney for former President Trump and his campaign, through which [he] repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public … and this Court concerning the 2020 Presidential election, in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani, Ted Goodman, issued a statement decrying the disbarment.

“Members of the legal community who respect the rule of law in this country should immediately come forward and speak out against this politically and ideologically corrupted decision. We will be appealing this objectively flawed decision in hopes that the appellate process will restore integrity into our system of justice,” the statement said.

The onetime presidential candidate keeps sinking lower and lower. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in 2023 but is still spending lavishly and ignoring his many creditors. Desperately trying to make money, he has resorted to selling his own brand of coffee but can’t find a new accountant after his old one dropped him. One of his former cronies, Lev Parnas, spilled the beans on how Giuliani tried to manufacture a Biden-Ukraine scandal, something that Giuliani still hasn’t given up on.

Will Giuliani dial back on the behavior that got him disbarred, or will he go into overdrive? He was indicted in Arizona for his election machinations there, and doubled down on his allegations of fraud. He had a pitiful defense for his actions: highlighting all of the states where he challenged election results. He even taunted the Arizona attorney general in trying to dodge a subpoena, only to be served near his Florida residence anyway. And Trump still hasn’t paid him for all of that legal work, either.

The bar taps at Donald Trump’s New Jersey clubs are running dry, and it’s not clear when the booze will start flowing again.

Liquor licenses for two of the former president’s clubs in the Garden State expired Sunday as state officials weigh whether Trump’s criminal conviction in his New York hush-money trial prevents him from ever renewing the beverage license. In the meantime, the New Jersey Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control issued interim permits to allow Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck and Trump National Golf Club Bedminster to temporarily sell alcohol until a hearing to determine the clubs’ future beverage sales is held on July 19.

That’s a little more than a week after Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in the criminal trial, though that date might be further delayed as Trump’s attorneys fight the conviction on the basis of a Monday Supreme Court ruling that expanded the boundaries of presidential immunity.

“The final judgment of conviction that raises the prospect of disqualifying Mr. Trump from an interest in a New Jersey liquor license due to the guilty verdict in New York will not be entered until after his sentencing,” a spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office told The Hill, adding that the burden of proof remains on the applicant to prove they meet the requirements for the license.

The Trump Organization has pushed back on the New Jersey investigation, arguing that the conviction should be irrelevant to the clubs’ operation as Trump himself is not the holder of the liquor licenses.

“As previously stated, President Trump is not the holder of any liquor license in New Jersey, and he is not an officer, director or operator of any entity that holds a liquor license in New Jersey,” a spokesperson for the Trump Organization told The Hill. “These liquor licenses support the livelihoods of many hundreds of hard working New Jersey residents, including bartenders, waiters and waitresses, they service thousands of members, and they contribute millions of dollars to the revenue streams of the State of New Jersey. We sincerely hope that this investigation is not political in nature, and given the foregoing, we feel confident that our licenses will remain unaffected.”