In the months leading up to President Biden’s underwhelming debate performance last month and his subsequent decision to call off his reelection campaign on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris made repeated efforts to assert and defend Biden’s mental acuity, according to a new analysis from Fox News Digital.
The questions posed to Harris about Biden’s mental capacity have been raised frequently since fall 2023, as the president has made a series of public comments that have raised concerns about his health ahead of an election year. The president is 81 years old, turning 86 at the end of his second term.
When asked about Biden’s age during a November interview on SiriusXM, Harris suggested that “the age on your birth certificate” is “not a measure of who a person is.”
“Let’s not get distracted. Let’s see if we have a president who actually delivers, keeps his promises and addresses issues that have needed to be addressed for years,” Harris said. “Joe Biden has done that. That’s the measure of his character, not the age on his birth certificate.”
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President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the Truman Balcony at the White House, Thursday, July 4, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Tierney L. Cross)
Biden announced he was suspending his reelection campaign on Sunday after weeks of mounting pressure from party members. He then endorsed Harris as his successor in another post and solicited donations.
Harris quickly accepted the president’s endorsement and announced her intention to seek the Democratic nomination in a statement. “I am honored to receive the President’s endorsement. My intention is to seek and win the nomination,” Harris said. “We are 107 days away from Election Day. We will fight together, and we will win together.”
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While 2023 has seen some gaffes from Biden, including falling at the Air Force Academy graduation in June, calling the Grand Canyon one of the “nine” wonders of the world in August and claiming in September that he was at Ground Zero the day after 9/11, even though records showed he was in Washington, D.C., on that day, Harris was asked if the president’s age was a concern.
“I would say age is not just a chronological fact,” Harris said in an interview at the DealBook Summit hosted by The New York Times in November 2023, adding that she has “absolute authority” during the conference.
The vice president also said in January that “we have to get over” the issue of the president’s age.
“So this issue that they’re bringing up about his age, because, again, they don’t have an electoral appeal,” Harris told Katie Couric one-on-one on iHeartRadio’s “Next Question with Katie Couric” podcast. “And I just think we’ve got to get past this, because ultimately I think what the American people deserve is for their leaders to offer solutions and to improve their standard of living.”
Harris has confirmed her intention to seek the Democratic nomination. (Bizayev Tesfaye)
Harris, 59, was later asked by ABC News about concerns about Biden’s fitness for the job.
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Biden in a variety of locations, including the Oval Office and the Emergency Room, and he is, in fact, extraordinarily smart and has the ability to see ahead to the challenges that we’re going to face as a nation and as a world,” Harris told the outlet in January.
When special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as a “caring, well-meaning, elderly man with a fragile memory” in his report on the handling of classified documents, Harris defended Biden, saying that was false.
“Accordingly, the president’s behavior as described in the report is completely at odds with the facts and is clearly politically motivated and without merit,” Harris said of the report at a gathering of Community Violence Intervention Leaders in February.
President Biden watches as he participates in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election alongside former President Trump at CNN studios in Atlanta on June 27, 2024. (Andrew Caballero Reynolds/AFP)
Just minutes after the June 27 debate ended, Harris appeared on CNN to defend the president’s performance, which had already caused uproar within the Democratic Party.
Asked about concerns about Biden’s performance in a post-debate interview, the vice president sought to undermine former President Trump, saying the president “got off to a slow start” but that the debate should not be compared to Biden’s “performance” over his three-and-a-half years as president.
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“Last night, President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump had their first debate, and the president said today that it was not his best performance,” Harris told voters in Las Vegas after the debate. “This election will not be decided overnight in June.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Harris for comment but had not heard back at the time of publication.
