Jill and I were honored to have so many close Allies and close friends in the same room yesterday evening at the White House.
We may not share a common language or common border – but we are neighbors because we all share common beliefs. pic.twitter.com/G8CYaCg2vV
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 11, 2024
Day: July 11, 2024
X Парламентский форум БРИКС • Президент России https://t.co/jb8P8emFIW pic.twitter.com/2WzQt1amCv
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) July 11, 2024
Разведки США и Германии сорвали попытку России убить главу Rheinmetall. Об этом со ссылкой на пять американских и других западных чиновников сообщает телеканал CNN. По его данным, в начале этого года разведка США узнала, что российское руководство планировало покушение на Армина… pic.twitter.com/z7TCbqrqM3
— DW на русском (@dw_russian) July 11, 2024
Russia Vows ‘Military Response’ to U.S. Missile Deployments in Germany – The New York Times https://t.co/PuxIP0bSJn
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) July 11, 2024
Biden News Conference Will End NATO Summit: Live Election Updates – The New York Times https://t.co/AOzEoIxlZf
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) July 11, 2024
President Biden will speak at a closely watched news conference Thursday as he faces mounting pressuring over the future of his candidacy. The news conference, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in Washington after a day of meetings with NATO leaders, comes as the president faced a fresh wave of calls for him to end his re-election bid.
Mr. Biden rarely gives news conferences — this will be his first alone on stage since November — and follows the disastrous debate performance against former President Donald J. Trump three weeks ago that left his supporters deeply shaken. Mr. Biden’s appearance will mix some of his greatest strengths as president — his diplomacy and foreign policy efforts — with an unscripted setting that could reassure or further unnerve Democrats on his most critical weaknesses — perceptions of his age, health and vigor.
Here’s what to know:
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President’s resistance: Mr. Biden has said that he is set on staying in the race and that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to drop out. Elected Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, have politely but firmly asserted that the matter is not closed and that Mr. Biden should again consider whether he is up for a vigorous campaign.
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Democratic split: Other Democratic lawmakers have been more explicit in their efforts to push Mr. Biden aside. Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday became the first Senate Democrat to call for Mr. Biden to withdraw from the race, while a small but growing number of House Democrats have explicitly called for him to do so. On Thursday, Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan joined them.
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Orban to meet Trump: Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump, is expected to meet with the former president later Thursday. Mr. Orban, who is in the United States for the NATO summit, has traveled for a series of meetings this month, including one with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
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Money stakes: Mr. Biden is also facing increased financial pressure on his re-election campaign. Several top fund-raisers and megadonors for the Democratic Party, including the actor George Clooney, called on Wednesday for the president to step aside and make way for a new candidate.
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Trump on the trail: Mr. Trump, who largely retreated from public view as Democrats openly agonized over Mr. Biden’s debate performance, held a rally on Tuesday night that was at times boastful about the state of the race and mercilessly cruel to his political opponents. Mr. Trump, who is expected to make his running mate announcement soon, denigrated Mr. Biden’s looks; called Chris Christie, a Republican presidential rival, “a fat pig”; and suggested that Nancy Pelosi might be deteriorating faster than Mr. Biden.
July 11, 2024, 11:40 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 11:40 a.m. ET
As a growing number of Democrats call on President Biden to step aside, a group of Black faith leaders is holding a news conference at the Georgia State Capitol in support of the president. Several influential leaders of Black churches in Atlanta are attending.
July 11, 2024, 11:35 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 11:35 a.m. ET
Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, said that dismissing Biden’s debate performance as one bad night “reflects a continuing pattern of denial and self-delusion.” A few days earlier, Torres had urged Democrats to hold their criticism for fear of weakening Biden if he remained the nominee. But in a social media post on Thursday, Torres came close to calling for the president to drop his re-election bid.
“If the president formally becomes the Democratic nominee, we will have no choice but to make the best of a complicated situation,” he wrote. “But there is no point in denying the complications.”
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July 11, 2024, 11:30 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 11:30 a.m. ET
The conservative entrepreneur and fund-raiser David Sacks is scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention next week, according to a person with knowledge of the schedule. Sacks hosts an influential podcast called “All-In” that featured an interview with Trump a few weeks ago, and he is a close associate of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who famously gave a speech at the R.N.C. in 2016.
July 11, 2024, 11:26 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 11:26 a.m. ET
Mary Trump, Donald J. Trump’s estranged niece and a Biden campaign surrogate, shrugged off George Clooney’s expression of no-confidence in Biden’s candidacy. “It should be much bigger news that Donald has lost the support of virtually every single person who served with him when he was in the Oval Office,” she wrote in a blog post. She drew attention to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump and was a target of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.
Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
July 11, 2024, 11:14 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 11:14 a.m. ET
Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, in a fund-raising appeal for President Biden, offered another irreverent rebuttal to fellow Democrats calling for Biden to end his re-election campaign. “There is only ONE person in this country who has ever kicked Trump’s a** in an election, and that is President Biden,” he wrote, adding: “I refuse to join the vultures on Joe’s shoulder following the debate.”
July 11, 2024, 11:10 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 11:10 a.m. ET
Another House Democrat, Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan, has called on Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee. “We just have too much at stake in this election to sit on the sidelines and be silent while we still have time to do something,” she told the Detroit News.
Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
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July 11, 2024, 10:50 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 10:50 a.m. ET
The Trump campaign continued to make hay out of George Clooney’s no-confidence message about President Biden’s re-election bid. It posted a video that mashes together a scene from Clooney’s movie “Up in the Air,” where he plays a corporate down-sizer who is firing someone, with a clip of Biden’s ABC News interview in which he says he “just had a bad night” during the debate.
President Biden will hold a news conference on Thursday evening.Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times
President Biden will hold his first solo news conference in eight months on Thursday when he faces reporters at the conclusion of a NATO summit in Washington, a critical test after his halting debate performance that seeded doubts about his re-election campaign.
The unscripted exchange with the news media comes as a growing number of Democrats on Capitol Hill and top donors have sounded alarms about Mr. Biden’s age and acuity, with some calling on him to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee.
Here’s what to know about the news conference:
It is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
The president will take questions at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, site of this week’s NATO summit. The news conference will wrap up a packed day for Mr. Biden, whose scheduled also includes two NATO working sessions and a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The New York Times will stream the news conference, alongside real-time commentary and analysis from reporters. The Associated Press will also offer a livestream at apnews.com.
Most cable news outlets will likely carry the news conference, given the intense scrutiny that Mr. Biden is facing to prove that he can handle unscripted moments.
July 11, 2024, 10:06 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 10:06 a.m. ET
A day after Senator Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democrat in the Senate to call on President Biden to end his re-election run, Vermont’s representative in the House, Becca Balint, issued a statement saying that she shares the “same concerns of so many Vermonters on the question of whether the president is the best candidate to defeat Trump.” Balint, a Democrat, did not call for Biden to leave the race but said: “We need honest, serious conversation about the best path forward.”
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July 11, 2024, 10:02 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 10:02 a.m. ET
In a sign of how Republicans are trying to leverage the questions around Biden’s mental acuity, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is holding a news conference in front of Brown’s office, saying the senator had helped hide Biden’s state. “He should fess up to the conspiracy, to the cover-up, and then take a position on whether he’s going to continue to ride with Biden,” Moreno said.
Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
July 11, 2024, 9:57 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 9:57 a.m. ET
The White House pushed back President Biden’s news conference today by an hour — it is now scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Eastern. The appearance will cap a packed day for the president, who will be under intense scrutiny over how he handles an unscripted exchange with the news media.
July 11, 2024, 10:03 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 10:03 a.m. ET
A national security official said it was delayed because of the president’s full schedule at NATO.
July 11, 2024, 9:48 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 9:48 a.m. ET
Jacob Helberg, a young conservative activist who has quickly gained a following in Silicon Valley and Washington, tells me that he yesterday made another $1 million donation to back Trump — this one to the super PAC MAGA Inc. Helberg, an avowed anti-China hawk, tells me that Trump “will be the most pro-technology president in American history.” Helberg was recently named the co-chair of a young professionals for Trump group that is hosting an event at the Republican convention.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at an event at the NATO summit in Washington on Tuesday.Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary will meet with former President Donald J. Trump in Florida on Thursday after the NATO summit in Washington, according to a Trump campaign official and a person close to the former president who was briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Orban, and the meeting comes after a series of others by the Hungarian leader this month, including one with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that caught many by surprise.
Hungary took over the European Union’s rotating presidency at the start of July with the promise to “make Europe great again” — echoing the “Make America Great Again” slogan of Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Orban has endorsed for the U.S. presidency.
Mr. Trump, who has a history of praising authoritarian leaders, often cites Mr. Orban’s support on the campaign trail. The two men met in March at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, where Mr. Trump lauded Mr. Orban as a “boss” because he did not brook political dissent. Both men are aligned in their anti-immigration views and their skepticism of NATO.
Although the E.U. presidency is largely a clerical position, Mr. Orban has engaged in a flurry of meetings with world leaders since taking over the position.
On July 2, he made an unexpected visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The move followed in the footsteps of other European leaders, but was one that Mr. Orban, an outlier in the European Union for his support of Russia and other issues, was known to have been avoiding.
Then on July 5, Mr. Orban traveled to Russia, meeting with Mr. Putin at the Kremlin for more than two hours. It was a rare trip to Russia by a European Union leader and one that caused alarm in capitals around the bloc. Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for Mr. Orban, said the leader’s trip to Moscow was “part of his peace mission.” There were no signs that the talks had done anything to sway Mr. Putin, however, with Mr. Orban telling reporters after that the positions of Kyiv and Moscow were “very far apart.”
Mr. Orban, a source of frustration for many European leaders, is known for embracing far-right politics and authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin. He has also made unclear calls for a cease-fire in Ukraine and direct negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, but has not publicly declared a concrete plan for a settlement.
Mr. Trump has also boasted of his closeness with Mr. Putin, frequently insisting in a hypothetical that his “very good relationship” with Russia’s leader would have kept him from invading Ukraine.
On Monday, Mr. Orban made yet another unexpected visit, this time to Beijing for previously unannounced talks with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. China’s official summary of their meeting said they exchanged their ideas on ending the war in Ukraine.
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July 11, 2024, 7:44 a.m. ET
July 11, 2024, 7:44 a.m. ET
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that 67 percent of Americans believe President Biden should end his re-election campaign — including 56 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents. But the race between him and former President Donald J. Trump for the popular vote is tied, according to the poll.
Senator Peter Welch of Vermont in the Capitol on Tuesday. He said on Wednesday that it was a hard decision to make but he thought President Biden should end his re-election campaign.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Senator Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday became the first Democratic senator to publicly call on President Biden to withdraw as the party’s presidential candidate in the aftermath of his disastrous debate performance last month.
“We can’t unsee what we saw,” Mr. Welch said in an interview shortly after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he called for Mr. Biden to end his campaign and allow another Democrat to take on former President Donald J. Trump. He said the president’s stumbles during the debate had only reinforced — rather than allayed — concerns about his ability to run a successful campaign.
“Age was a big issue going into the debate, and it was an opportunity, obviously, that the White House saw to put that to rest, and coming out of the debate, it intensified it,” the first-term senator said. “And that’s a real problem.”
Mr. Welch, 77, said his decision to call on the president to step aside was extremely difficult because he and voters in his home state “love Joe Biden.” He touted the 2020 election results, in which Vermonters delivered Mr. Biden the highest percentage victory of any state in the country.
But he said those same voters had deep anxieties about the future, fearing that four years under a second Trump administration would remove any chance of extending progressive policies championed by Mr. Biden and could wipe away the progress they have supported over the last four years.
Mr. Welch said it had become an existential issue for him to consider the threat of another Trump presidency, and that his determination was that Mr. Biden was not up to beating the former president.
“It’s not the elites in Vermont who are talking to me,” Mr. Welch said, brushing back an argument that Mr. Biden has made in recent days as he has defiantly refused to leave the race. “It’s the working-class mother who’s got two kids and is hoping maybe we can get the child care tax back. It’s kids who are working in AmeriCorps just to do cleanup and environmental work who are terrified that all the achievements of the Biden administration on the environment are going to be erased if we get a Trump presidency.”
“It’s a catastrophe,” he added.
The senator said he is not blind to the risks that could come should Mr. Biden step down, but rejected comparisons to the meltdown Democrats faced in 1968, when chaos and violence at the party convention in Chicago contributed to then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loss in the general election that November.
“One of the achievements of Joe Biden is that he has unified the Democratic Party — everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin,” Mr. Welch said. “And what that means is that if we have to go through ‘Who’s our next candidate?,’ it’s going to be among people who are all committed to the Biden commitment to save democracy, the Biden commitment to the environment, the Biden commitment to women’s rights.”
Andrew Tobias at a state dinner last year at the White House.Credit…Pool photo by Tierney Cross
On June 28, the day after the debate with Donald J. Trump that sent his campaign into turmoil, President Biden appeared at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan to raise money from the L.G.B.T.Q. wing of the Democratic Party.
Pete Buttigieg spoke. Elton John introduced Mr. Biden. And a co-chair of the event was Andrew Tobias, 77, who served as the treasurer for the Democratic National Committee from 1999 to 2017. Mr. Tobias remains a formidable party financier: He has raised nearly $2.5 million for the Biden-Harris re-election effort.
But he now says he hopes that Mr. Biden will end his campaign and help facilitate the selection of a new Democratic nominee in his place.
“I’m in the camp that believes our odds of winning are better with a mini-primary,” Mr. Tobias said, alluding to discussions among Democratic insiders about how best to choose a new standard-bearer if Mr. Biden were indeed to step aside.
In an interview, Mr. Tobias stressed repeatedly that Mr. Biden “and his team of 4,000 highly competent appointees” were “a thousand times — a million times — better than Trump and the team he would assemble.” He added that believes Mr. Biden has been one of our finest presidents in modern history and said that if he remains the Democratic nominee come November, he believes the party could “persuade enough voters to see that he and his team are the far, far better choice.”
“But we might have a stronger chance of winning if he passes the torch,” Mr. Tobias added. “And winning is all that matters. Either way, I’m all in.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris in Dallas on Wednesday. With an increasing number of Democrats questioning whether President Biden can and should serve another four years, she has been more explicit about the dangers she sees in a Trump second term.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up her attacks on former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday as she said in Dallas that Mr. Trump would round up his political enemies, deport peaceful protesters and terminate the Constitution in a second term.
“Consider: Donald Trump has openly vowed if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one, that he will weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies, round up peaceful protesters and throw them out of our country and even, and even and I quote, ‘terminate’ the United States Constitution,” Ms. Harris said.
Ms. Harris has been harshly critical of Mr. Trump in the past, but at campaign events in the last two days, as an increasing number of Democrats question whether President Biden has the ability to beat Mr. Trump in November and the acuity to serve another four years, she has been far more explicit about the dangers she sees in a Trump second term. Ms. Harris has emerged as a top replacement for Mr. Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket should he drop out of the race.
In Dallas, Ms. Harris tried to attach Mr. Trump to Project 2025, a policy and staffing blueprint assembled by dozens of conservative groups for the next Republican administration. Among the platform proposals include replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president.
Ms. Harris accused Mr. Trump of adopting the project, which would shrink the Department of Education and cut programs like Head Start, the federal program for preschool children from low-income families.
“Let us be clear, this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future,” Ms. Harris told roughly 20,000 people at an event for Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority of which Ms. Harris is a member.
In her warning about the Constitution, Ms. Harris was referring to a statement from Mr. Trump in 2022 about Twitter. The site blocked links to a New York Post article that described emails found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Mr. Trump wrote at the time on his social media network, Truth Social. He also included in the post the lie that the 2020 election was “false & fraudulent.”
In December, he told Fox News that he would not be a dictator “other than Day 1” of his second term.
Project 2025, which is led by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is not Mr. Trump’s official campaign platform, and the former president has recently sought to distance himself from it. But the plans were developed by some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers who are likely to be involved in a potential second term, and many of the policies in Project 2025 mirror Mr. Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47.
In a statement, Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, accused “Team Biden” of “fear-mongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people.”
With Mr. Biden mired in controversy after his disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, Mr. Trump has increasingly taken aim at Ms. Harris. Mr. Trump has dubbed her “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and intentionally mispronounces her name at campaign events. Ms. Harris’s recent sharp rebukes of Mr. Trump come to the relief of many Democrats who felt she was too cautious and scripted when she first came to the White House.
But while political momentum is building for Ms. Harris, she is also navigating a difficult balancing act in not spotlighting the messaging limitations of her boss.
On Wednesday in Dallas, the crowd gasped when Ms. Harris first mentioned Mr. Trump’s name about midway through her speech. She noted that he had appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who joined the majority in overturning Roe v. Wade.
Sonia Southerland, a 69-year-old member of the sorority, said she was struck by how Ms. Harris explained the stakes of the election, specifically his potential plans for a second term.
“We can take that message back to our communities,” Ms. Southerland said, “back to our families, back to our big and little girls, and help them to understand what is happening in this country at this moment.”
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President Biden, who in the past has batted away questions about his advanced age by telling skeptics to “watch me,” will have one of the most consequential audiences of his political career as he steps to the lectern in Washington and faces a horde of journalists on Thursday. Members of Congress, Democratic donors, party strategists, voters, foreign leaders and officials within his own White House are planning to tune in for what is expected to be a real-time test of Biden’s ability to think on his feet and deliver under pressure.
The pivotal event comes as Biden is trying to save his candidacy and convince Democrats that his faltering debate performance last month was simply a “bad night” and not indicative of a broader decline in his cognitive abilities. The outsize importance of the news conference also underscores how Biden’s attempts over the past two weeks to downplay his debate stumbles and move forward with his presidential campaign have so far failed to convince many in his party.
Even as the president has defiantly declared that he will stay in the race and shored up his support this week by winning over key constituencies, the number of top Democrats who have remained silent or voiced only tepid support indicates that a poor showing at the news conference could unleash a fresh wave of defections. Anxious Democrats fear Biden’s weak showing in polls and halting public appearances could pave the way for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a prospect some have described as an existential threat to the country’s democracy.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that he remained “deeply concerned” about Biden’s prospects against Trump, joining the chorus of Democrats who have argued that Biden needs to do more in the days ahead to reassure voters and lawmakers.
“I think he needs to continue effectively and aggressively making his case to the American people and earning their support, as well as a number of my colleagues,” he said.
Biden’s aides have suggested that the president’s activity over the past two weeks — which has included multiple rallies, a handful of interviews, some well-received speeches, impromptu conversations with supporters and a hosting role at the NATO summit in Washington — have helped him stem the calls for him to drop out of the race. Campaign officials pointed to the president’s defiant letter Monday asserting that he would remain in the race and highlighted the statements of support he has received from some Democratic officials in recent days.
Still, several party leaders remain skeptical, and some have warned that Biden’s inability to quickly bounce back from the debate with public displays of vigor has been particularly concerning. Democratic lawmakers have said for days that they wanted to see Biden in more unscripted settings, speaking without notes or a teleprompter, to show that the debate in which he often struggled to complete his sentences was just a one-off.
That the news conference is coming a full two weeks after the debate has struck some in the party as a telling sign, and several Democratic aides and lawmakers have predicted that the president will perform poorly before a press corps primed to ask challenging questions about his age and acuity.
Several congressional aides and some lawmakers, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said they see the news conference as the first real test of the 81-year-old’s cognitive abilities since the June 27 debate, noting that he will not have a script and will have to navigate a wide-ranging set of questions. The event caps NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, which Biden hosted this week, though questions about his political standing and health are likely to dominate.
Biden will face reporters at a time when many in his party are demoralized over his weak standing in the presidential race, in the wake of several polls showing him trailing Trump in key swing states. While Trump, 78, is only slightly younger than Biden, voters have expressed far more concern about Biden’s ability to serve as president for four more years. In a New York Times-Siena College poll released after the debate, 74 percent of voters viewed Biden as too old to serve effectively as president; 42 percent said the same about Trump.
On Tuesday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said on CNN that he feared Biden was on track to lose to Trump in a “landslide” and that the White House needed to do more to “demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election.”
On Wednesday, Biden faced a new round of skepticism, with more lawmakers either calling for him to step aside or saying they wanted him to show more political vitality before they could fully support him. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) became the first senator to publicly call on Biden to step aside, in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) repeatedly urged Biden to make a decision about whether to stay in the presidential race, despite the president’s insistence that he has already made up his mind to remain at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Also on Wednesday, George Clooney, the Hollywood actor and a top fundraiser for Biden’s reelection, called for the president to be replaced as the Democratic nominee. In a New York Times op-ed, Clooney, who hosted Biden for a fundraiser last month, suggested that the president was losing the battle with time.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
The flurry of doubt surrounding the president raises the stakes for his news conference, according to several Democratic officials, who indicated they will be watching closely for any stumbles or signs of weakness. For their part, Biden’s aides are hoping a solid showing Thursday will help him finally put the drama over the debate in the rearview mirror.
Supporters and detractors alike have noted that timing could be in Biden’s favor. If he makes it through the news conference without sparking a fresh round of intraparty panic, focus will begin to shift toward Trump and the Republicans, who are holding their nominating convention next week. Trump is expected to announce his running mate in coming days, and Congress will be out of session next week.
Biden has not always performed well at major solo news conferences, which have been rarities during his presidency.
In January 2022, Biden stood before reporters for nearly two hours, fielding inquiries on a wide range of issues and occasionally getting testy with journalists who asked pointed questions.
After the event, first lady Jill Biden berated the president’s aides for allowing the event to go on so long, according to the book “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden.”
Since then, the president has held significantly fewer substantive engagements with the media compared with his predecessors.
Biden has participated in 36 news conferences during his presidency, the fewest of any president during the same period since Ronald Reagan, according to data compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, professor emerita of political science at Towson University and the director of the White House Transition Project.
Biden has largely favored so-called two-by-two news conferences, in which he addresses the media while standing next to a foreign leader, with questions limited to two journalists from each country’s delegation. He often keeps his answers brief, rarely engaging in the kind of lengthy, professorial responses embraced by former president Barack Obama or the long-winded riffs by Trump.
In recent press appearances, Biden has occasionally read his answers from notecards rather than speaking extemporaneously. His voice at times has been low and gravelly. He has sometimes mixed up names or stopped himself midsentence rather than completing his thought, with Republicans seizing on each flub.
White House aides, who often determine which journalists are called on, have occasionally tried to fish out the substance of reporters’ questions ahead of the events, a practice that predates Biden’s presidency but has gained additional scrutiny due to the focus on the president’s mental acuity.
Two radio hosts said Saturday that they were supplied questions from Biden aides before separate interviews with him last week, a practice the campaign initially defended but later said it would refrain from going forward.
Republicans responded by suggesting that Biden was not mentally fit to answer unscripted questions. Officials from the Republican National Committee — who have become adept at taking clips of Biden’s stumbles at public appearances and circulating them — have often lambasted the president during news conferences and suggested, without evidence, that the events are scripted.
In addition to the content of his answers and his delivery, the president’s demeanor will also be in focus as party officials scrutinize whether he appears vigorous enough to carry Democrats’ message against Trump in coming months.
Biden has sometimes bristled over reporters’ attempts to ask multiple questions or lashed out at journalists who query him about issues that he considers off-topic.
The conference will cap a NATO summit during which the president announced that new F-16 fighter jets would be going to Ukraine; praised member countries for increasing their defense spending; and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
While several journalists are likely to query Biden on Thursday about the 2024 race and the issues that have come to dominate it — his age, health and political standing — world leaders will also be watching the news conference to see whether the president shows proficiency and deftness on a range of global issues.
For his part, Biden has suggested that he will use his future public appearances to challenge Trump more directly, and he told donors Monday that he would take a different approach to a future debate with the presumptive Republican nominee.
“Attack, attack, attack, attack,” he said.
Jacqueline Alemany, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Marianna Sotomayor, Mariana Alfaro and Liz Goodwin contributed to this report.
President Biden is holding a solo press conference today — his first since November — to conclude the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., Thursday evening. It will be one of his biggest public tests since last month’s unsteady debate performance, which caused alarm among Democrats on Capitol Hill and raised questions about whether he should be the party’s 2024 presidential nominee.
The president has acknowledged he had what he says was a “bad night” at the debate and he has been trying to prove he can be the nominee and defeat former President Donald Trump.
What spurred this concern about Biden’s campaign?
During the debate, Mr. Biden, 81, stumbled early on, flubbing lines as his voice appeared ready to give out. His campaign later said he was suffering from a cold. His voice never recovered throughout the 90-minute debate, he failed to effectively respond to a number of false statements made by Trump during the debate, and at times he lost his train of thought. At one point, he struggled to name Medicare when answering a question about the tax rate for wealthy Americans, and then said that “we finally beat Medicare.”
Mr. Biden’s campaign had hoped to allay concerns about his age with the early debate, but instead, that performance is now threatening his political future.
Recently, Mr. Biden said the NATO summit could be a test of his fitness for office, and Democrats on Capitol Hill, Democratic governors and world leaders will be watching, too.
“Who’s going to be able to hold NATO together like me,” the president challenged ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview last week. He added, “I guess a good way to judge me is you’re going to have now the NATO conference here in the United States next week. Come listen. See what they say.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told the Washington Post the NATO summit “gives [Mr. Biden] an opportunity to showcase his leadership and foreign policy credentials, and the press conference gives him an opportunity to address concerns.”
The president has declined to agree to take a in-depth neurocognitive test, telling Stephanopoulos on Friday that every day in office is a cognitive test.
“I’m running the world,” the president said.
Aside from the ABC News interview, the president has largely relied on teleprompters to deliver speeches. Some Democrats say they want to see the president unscripted on the campaign trail and to meet with him in person, while reporters have called on the president to hold a press conference as soon as possible.
What time is Biden’s news conference scheduled to begin today?
The president’s press conference is now scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. ET, though the timing may slide. Mr. Biden’s day is filled with working sessions with world leaders who have gathered for the summit.
What’s happened at NATO?
Russia’s war on Ukraine continues to be a key theme for NATO, as Mr. Biden and other world leaders make the case that Russia will not stop at Ukraine. The president announced air defense equipment will be given to Ukraine by the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Italy. In the coming months, the U.S. and its partners will provide Ukraine with dozens of additional tactical air defense systems, he said.
“We know Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. But make no mistake — Ukraine can and will stop Putin,” the president said of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Latest information about the president’s health
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week that the president has not been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease or any other serious neurological disorder.
On Tuesday, Jean-Pierre said Walter Reed neurologist Dr. Kevin Cannard’s January visit to the White House was not for the purpose of treating the president. But on Tuesday night, the Associated Press reported that Cannard visited Mr. Biden at the White House in January. Jean-Pierre then released a statement saying that Cannard had in fact met with the president at the White House in January, but only as a part of his annual physical, the rest of which was completed in February.
The White House and the president say he’s up for another four years on the job, despite concerns from voters and some Democrats.
How is Biden polling against Trump?
CBS News polling shows Mr. Biden has slipped slightly in head-to-head polling against Trump, although within the margin of error. Trump now has a 3-point edge over Mr. Biden across the battleground states collectively, and a 2-point edge nationally. That’s due in part to Democrats saying they’re less likely than Republicans to “definitely” vote.
CBS News/YouGov polling shows President Biden has slipped in head-to-head polling since the debate. CBS News
Mr. Biden has cast doubt on polling and his low approval numbers. When Stephanopoulos said he’s never seen a president reelected with a 36% approval rating, the president retorted that he doesn’t believe the number.
“Well, I don’t believe that’s my approval rating,” the president told Stephanopoulos. “That’s not what our polls show,” though he declined to provide any specific numbers.
Kathryn Watson
Kathryn Watson is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
Biden to hold news conference today amid debate over his 2024 campaign. Here’s what to know before he speaks. – CBS News https://t.co/YQ9TIPdPRh
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) July 11, 2024
Prominent figures, including actor George Clooney and Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.), are calling for President Joe Biden to step aside in the upcoming presidential race, advocating for a new Democratic nominee. These calls for change come as Biden concludes a three-day NATO summit, following what many perceived as a lackluster performance in his debate against former President Donald Trump in their first presidential debate.
Biden will host a post-NATO summit press conference Wednesday night at 5:30 p.m. ET.
Yahoo Finance senior columnist Rick Newman explains why this press conference will serve as a crucial test for Biden, examining the potential implications of Biden’s performance on voter perception and party support.
Read more about the calls for Biden to step aside from the 2024 presidential race:
Biden-Trump debate sparks Democratic party concerns
Top concerns around a last-minute Biden exit from election
Biden’s 2024 hopes ‘on collision course’ with Democrats’ fears
2024 election may be a ‘bloodbath’ for Dems if Biden runs
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Catalysts.
This post was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
Turning now to President Biden, facing a key test as he set to close out the NATO summit with a press conference at 5:30 p.m. Eastern time today.
This coming as he just lost support from actor George Clooney, the actor writing in an op ed for The New York Times quote, We are not going to win in November with this president calling on top Democrats to ask Biden to voluntarily step aside.
We also had the Senator Peter Welch, also calling for President Biden to step aside in the race, wrote an op ed for The Washington Post.
This is significant because it’s the first Democratic senator coming out calling for President Biden to step aside in the race.
So where do we go from here?
We want to bring in our very own Rick Newman and Rick.
It’s another day and more pressure, obviously, continuing out to mount here on President Biden to step aside in the race.
Senility watch continues, I guess, is the way I would put it.
Regrettably, So Biden has this press conference today at 5:30 p.m.
This is going to be at the end of the three day NATO summit in Washington DC.
This is the type of event that in North all times most people wouldn’t pay any attention to.
The You know, the NATO member nations did accomplish a few important things at this conference.
For one thing, they said, Ukraine will become a member of NATO at some point.
We don’t know when, but that is a strong statement of support for Ukraine and its war against Russia.
But that’s not what people are going to be watching for.
Obviously, when Biden takes does his press conference at 530.
I mean, the pressure is incredible, given that we’re just a few months before the election here.
So Biden has to prove he has total recall of all the names of the people he talked with this week.
He’s not going to mix up any facts.
He has to show that he can keep his train of thought and he is going to get hammered by the press because, I mean, this is this is now the cognitive test.
I mean, Biden hasn’t done the sort of cognitive test Trump claims to have done, which I don’t think Trump actually did.
But he is now going to face a cognitive test every time he goes on live TV.
So we will see how he does today.
And I guess if Biden has another slip up like he did during the June 27th debate, um, I mean, that could be the thing that finally brings his campaign to an end and gets us to a replacement candidate.
And if he, uh, if he does, really?
Well, um, I’m I’m not sure that puts any doubts to rest.
So, um, a very awkward position for Biden to be in.
I’m curious about the strategy from the side of Democrats here.
I just want to know in a couple of years when Democrats are chatting at the Thanksgiving table about this moment in time, are they going to look at?
This is a moment that the Democratic strategy to not fully support Biden was one that lost the election and gave it over to Trump, or is something that was an effective move to save the Democratic Party this election cycle.
I mean, I love the question, Mattie, you’re sort of trying to step out of the moment and say, What the heck is actually going on here?
I think it depends on the outcome.
If Biden stays in this race and then loses to Trump, he is going to be a sort of a Democratic villain for a long time.
Um, because it’s clear that a lot of Democrats want to see a younger candidate.
And, by the way, there are some very promising younger Democrats.
I mean, there are some governors who are very popular in their home states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, For example, Um, there are people in Biden’s Cabinet who are very capable and and in some sense Biden just won’t get out of the way, uh, and let a younger generation step up.
So if he stays in the race and he loses, um, then Biden’s a villain.
If Biden does step aside, then it depends on whether his replacement wins or loses.
So if he steps aside and and the next Democrat who steps in defeats Donald Trump, it’ll it’ll look like while Biden.
It took some convincing, but he he manned up and he did the right thing.
And then if that person loses, it’ll be like, Oh my God, there’s no Democrat who can save this party, so it really depends.
I mean, we’re really at pivotal moments here on a historic basis during just the next few days and weeks.
Yeah, we got to run, Rick, but it really makes you wonder why we waited to have this conversation.
Now, thank you so much for joining us.
As always.
We appreciate it.