Desperate Biden Fumbles Major Opportunity to Drum Up Support

A crushing Zoom call between President Joe Biden and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Friday began with an hour-long delay, and ended in seemingly the first instance of a lawmaker telling the president directly that he should exit the 2024 race.

Originally, just two members of the caucus were going to be allowed to ask Biden questions: Representatives Sylvia Garcia and Lou Correa, reported NOTUS. But trouble brewed after Biden tried to open up the floor for comments from other lawmakers.

Representatives Gabe Vasquez and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez—the latter of whom had already called for Biden’s withdrawal—both attempted to use the “raise hand” feature on the teleconference platform in order to ask a question but had their signal disabled by leaders of Bold PAC, the caucus’s political arm.

Still, one member was able to sneak in some final comments: Representative Mike Levin, who announced to the president that he believed Biden should step out of the race and allow another party leader to face off against Donald Trump in November.

Before the call’s host, Representative Linda T. Sánchez, abruptly shut down the meeting, Biden responded that the growing calls for his withdrawal are precisely why he’s letting people “poke” him and ask him questions.

“It’s a legitimate concern for people, but that’s why I think it’s important I gotta get out and show people everything from how well I move to how much I know and that I’m still in good charge,” Biden told Levin, according to CNN.

But apparently, Biden did not make as good a showing as he hoped. Shortly after the call concluded, Levin released a statement reiterating his call for Biden to withdraw from the race.

President Joe Biden’s assuredness that he intends to stay in the 2024 presidential race, amid mounting calls for him to drop out from within his own party, is reportedly having the opposite effect on some of his top-dollar donors. 

Some of Biden’s biggest backers are withholding roughly $90 million in pledged contributions to Future Forward, the largest pro-Biden super PAC, until the president decides to withdraw, two anonymous sources told The New York Times. 

In the wake of Biden’s disastrous performance at the presidential debate last month, multiple donors are holding off on making their eight-figure commitments, the sources said. They wouldn’t offer specifics on which donors were behind the cash freeze. 

One donor to Future Forward said that the super PAC had approached them multiple times since the debate, but he and his friends had been “holding off” on contributing. 

Future Forward would not comment on any conversations with donors, but an adviser for the group said that they presumed that all donations would resume once the uncertainty about the Democratic ticket was resolved. 

Some of Biden’s donors have begun working furiously behind the scenes to make way for the president to step aside and bring in another candidate. A group of donors has reportedly begun working to raise $100 million for the Next Generation PAC. Other major donors have directly called for the president to drop out, including Abigail Disney, who said the Biden campaign would not receive “another dime” until Biden was dropped from the top of the ticket.  

Thus far, Biden has dismissed concerns from donors as the opinions of party elites, a decision that suggests a self-sabotaging single-mindedness. As he forges ahead with his campaign, the president is likely to feel that decision where it hurts most: in his wallet. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is loath to directly criticize Donald Trump. But he is opposing Trump’s America First foreign policy, calling this week’s NATO summit a “top priority, no question about it.”

“This is the most important thing going on in the world right now,” McConnell said in an interview with Punchbowl News.  

The Kentucky senator has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, consistently pushing for funding to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion. In contrast, Trump has a long history of supporting President Vladimir Putin and Russia, and has even questioned the need to fund Ukraine. 

Trump has endorsed primary candidates who parrot his pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine position, in opposition to candidates who have taken the establishment GOP position advocated by McConnell. In Utah’s Republican Senate primary last month to replace the retiring Mitt Romney, Trump’s pick was defeated by a pro-Ukraine Republican. 

“I’m hoping that people on our side have figured out this is not some kind of political suicide mission to support [Ukraine].… The political situation among Republicans has improved,” McConnell said.

McConnell went further in criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, comparing it to the nativist language from before World War II.

“The language they used in the ’20s and ’30s are similar to what you hear today—‘America First,’” he said. He also criticized Trump’s friendship with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, whom the convicted felon is meeting on Friday. Orbán visited Moscow in recent days and used pro-Russian language to describe the war in Ukraine.  

“By highlighting that, I’m hoping [conservatives] might decide they better keep better company,” McConnell said. “And that’s not just the former president, but other so-called conservative groups that have invited him over or gone over there.

“My guess is they’re having some second thoughts about that, because many of them argue we ought to be spending our time worrying about China,” McConnell added. “Well, [Orbán] is completely in bed with the Chinese and the Russians. So I hope highlighting that issue changes behavior.” 

McConnell and Trump have a tortured relationship. As president, Trump appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as secretary of transportation, but then made racist attacks on her and accused McConnell of being compromised by China. Trump has also called McConnell a “dumb son of a b----.” McConnell nonetheless endorsed Trump’s 2024 candidacy, but only after Trump locked up the GOP nomination.

Democrats are searching for possible pathways away from another Joe Biden nomination, including by essentially staging a revolt at the Democratic National Convention in August.

At least 21 Democratic lawmakers have formally called on the president to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, while some high-profile party leaders, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have signaled behind closed doors that the president’s time leading the party is over. After Biden reaffirmed during a post-NATO Summit press conference on Thursday that he would not be taking his name off the ballot, the intraparty panic began to fuel curiosity about a potential alternative.

At least one Democratic National Committee member and convention delegate is openly speculating about simply not endorsing Biden at the convention. Joe Salazar, a former Colorado state representative and a DNC delegate at the August convention, believes that the conference should force Biden off the ticket if he refuses to step aside on his own.

“No Democrat presidential candidate should ever be trailing Donald Trump. That dude is a treasonous lyin’ multi-felon,” Salazar told The Lever’s podcast Lever Time. “I’ve been hearing from people before Biden announced his reelection campaign. And people were concerned then back in August and September, about the fact that he was thinking about running again. And so he decided to run.”

But Salazar says that since Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, Coloradans of every stripe are “begging and pleading” that he figure out a way to get the president to step down.

Biden isn’t yet the party’s official nominee, although he did win thousands of delegates through the Democratic primary, during which the DNC did not truly consider other options. That has provided the basis for Salazar’s plan.

The DNC’s official rules designate that pledged delegates’ votes must in “good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” The nomination process requires a candidate to win 1,976 delegates. Since Biden has already secured 3,896 delegates, he should be a shoo-in on the first ballot, even if a significant number of delegates opt to defect.

But on the second ballot, approximately 700 superdelegates, who include governors and lawmakers, will join the vote, and their inclusion could potentially turn the vote.

“If Biden doesn’t budge, Salazar and others hope that DNC rules could allow them to file a petition to call for a different candidate, and essentially revolt at the convention,” explained Lever Time host Arjun Singh. “He added that this is still a hypothetical point. But he and an official in the Colorado Democratic Party are actively exploring whether their idea of a petition could be a provable workaround.”

However, should Biden decide to leave the race by his own volition before the convention, all of his pledged delegates will be released to nominate whomever they choose.

Donald Trump is desperately trying to use George Clooney’s call for President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race to his advantage … and it’s coming across weirdly flirtatious? 

In one of his latest fundraising emails, the former president highlighted Clooney’s recent break from his Democratic ranks. 

“George Clooney just said Biden should drop out,” the email read. “Does that mean he’s endorsing me?!”

“Even though he’s a proud member of the Hate-America Hollywood Elite, I will gladly accept his endorsement IF he pledges to change his ways!” Trump wrote, adding, “But I honestly couldn’t care less what George Clooney thinks.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery hit the nail on the head, writing, “Trump’s latest weird fundraising email reads like a desperate plea to date George Clooney fresh out of a breakup.”

Sure, Biden and Clooney appear to be splitting up. The president even reportedly unfollowed the Academy Award–winning actor on social media—a classic breakup move. 

But the space between the president and one of his most outspoken backers certainly doesn’t leave space for Trump to, for lack of better words, slide in. Trump is simply anxious to use the star power of his haters to elevate his platform, to supplement his own lack of high-profile celebrity support. 

What Trump really doesn’t want anyone to know is that he, and the Republicans, really want Biden to stay in the race because they think they can beat him. So by calling for Biden to drop out of the race, Clooney isn’t so much signaling a crush on Trump but rather that he hopes to crush him in November.