President Biden claimed on Tuesday that he was exhausted from traveling abroad and nearly “fell asleep” during his dismal performance at last week’s debate, despite having a 13-day recovery period from his recent international trip, which included a full week of napping at Camp David.
The 81-year-old president has offered a new excuse amid growing calls from Democratic lawmakers for him to step aside and field a new presidential candidate ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
“I decided to take a couple of trips around the world right before the debate,” Biden told Democratic donors in McLean, Va. “And that wasn’t a very smart thing to do. [to be] I’ve traveled the world a few times.”
“I didn’t listen to my staff… and almost fell asleep on stage,” the president added.
Biden denounced the overseas travel despite having made only two short international trips recently — a visit to France to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings from June 5-9 and attending the G7 summit in Italy from June 12-14 — ahead of his June 27 CNN debate with former President Donald Trump.
The president spent the first day of his visit to France at a hotel without any official events.
Biden stayed at a vacation home in Rehoboth Beach before traveling to Camp David in western Maryland from June 18 to 20, and did not appear in public in the week leading up to the debate.
Debate preparation sessions “never began before 11 a.m., and Biden was given time for a nap each afternoon,” The New York Times reported. report Tuesday.
Biden’s disastrous debate performance, with a soft, raspy voice and incomprehensible phrases like “we finally won Medicare,” initially led aides to suggest it was at least partly due to a cold.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, on Tuesday became the first sitting member of Biden’s party to call on Biden to step down, writing that Biden should follow the example of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who chose not to seek reelection in 1968.
Another Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, Editorial He too told the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday that he doesn’t have confidence in Biden.
“Biden’s poor performance in the debate didn’t surprise me,” Golden wrote, “and it didn’t upset me as much as it did others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months. I’m not going to vote for Biden, but Donald Trump is going to win, and I’m OK with that.”
Trump, 78, is now leading Biden in states that overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020, including New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia, according to an internal Democratic Party post-debate poll released by Pac-News on Tuesday.
According to a CBS News poll released Monday, 45% of Democrats They want Biden gone, a position also asserted by The New York Times editorial board on Friday.
