Biden’s family, angry at what they feel is a betrayal by Democratic lawmakers who urged the 81-year-old president to step down, are reportedly discussing how and when he should step down from the 2024 presidential race.
Powerful political families are weighing the issue, taking into account the health of the 81-year-old president and the nation’s interests. A source told NBC News..
Personally, his family, including first lady Jill Biden, his eldest son Hunter and his sister Valerie Owens, feel disrespected by people they considered friends within the Democratic establishment.
“If this is what they wanted, there could have been a more dignified way of doing it,” a Biden campaign insider told the outlet. “It’s not right to treat a public servant who has given so much to this country like this.”
Publicly, neither the White House nor the president’s campaign have signaled he might abandon his reelection bid.
“That is not what happened,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Those making these allegations are not speaking on behalf of Mr. Trump’s family or team. They will be proven wrong. Keep the faith.”
Still, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon acknowledged in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday that the president has “faltered” recently and needs to pick himself up, but said he is “absolutely” continuing to campaign despite the tough weeks.
“I think it’s inevitable,” another person close to the reelection campaign told NBC.
Biden himself acknowledged in a BET interview published this week that he would consider dropping out of the race “if I had some kind of health problem and someone, a doctor, came to me and said, you have this problem and that problem.”
On Wednesday, Trump canceled an appearance at a campaign event in Las Vegas and evacuated with his family to Delaware after testing positive for COVID-19 and experiencing symptoms that his doctor described as “general fatigue.”
Following his disastrous defeat in the debate with President Trump on June 27 and subsequent poor performances in media interviews, calls in Congress for the oldest president in history to step down are growing day by day.One A high-profile press conference during the NATO summit in Washington DC last week ended in failure.
As of Friday morning, Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico became the second Democrats in the Senate to publicly call on Biden to drop his candidacy, joining 24 other Democrats in the House.
Former President Barack Obama, along with House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), are also reportedly pressuring his one-time vice presidential nominee to reconsider.
While no senators have publicly voiced distrust for the party leader, they all appear to have discussed the poor poll numbers. Last week, Schumer paid a personal visit to Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Policy Research poll this week found that 65% of Democrats and 70% of Americans want Biden to drop out.
But other polls suggest that no Democratic candidate in the running to succeed Trump is significantly more likely to do so, including Vice President Kamala Harris, if the president so decides.
Deep-pocketed Democratic donors are also stoking fears that their party’s candidates will suffer major losses on Election Day in 2024, with House Majority PAC treasurer Brian Wolf warning that “everything is at stake.”
“You can’t alienate the constituency that wants to support Biden or the constituency that wants to support somebody else,” Wolf told NBC.
