Joe Biden is facing fresh calls to abandon his re-election campaign after he mixed up Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, but he’s in no mood to drop out yet.
Almost two years ago, another Prime Minister was making his debut on the world stage. At a holiday resort in Bali in the sweltering heat, Rishi Sunak sat down for his first meeting with Joe Biden. When the cameras weren’t rolling, the President told the newbie PM of his determination to run again. He argued that he needed to be the Democratic Party’s candidate as he was the best person to beat Donald Trump.
Since his disastrous performance at the CNN debate two weeks ago, the list of people who share that view has got ever shorter. The calls for Mr. Biden, 81, to abandon his campaign are now deafening.
However, when Keir Starmer met him in the Oval Office on Wednesday, I was struck by how he actually seemed to be in good form as I watched him up close from inside the room. Yes, he spoke quietly with a slight mumble and his movements were slow. Mr. Starmer appeared to speak to him in a deliberately loud voice.
Yet Mr. Biden seemed surprisingly sharp as he cracked jokes about football. When Mr. Starmer was asked if “it’s coming home” after England secured a place in the Euro 2024 final, without skipping a beat, the President quipped that the success was “all because of the Prime Minister”. And after the PM told how he’d watched part of the semi-final against the Netherlands with the Dutch PM, Mr. Biden laughed: “And you guys are still talking to one another?”
When it was just the two leaders and their aides in the room, the President is said to have regaled his guests with amusing stories, which may have been slightly rambling but were relevant to the conversation.
Things didn’t go quite as well as he spoke at two press conferences on the final day of the NATO summit yesterday. First, he referred to Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”, before slipping up again an hour later when he praised his running mate Kamala Harris but called her “Vice President Trump”. It was a disaster.
Facing question after question from reporters about whether he’s up to serving four more years, Mr. Biden conceded: “I just got to pace myself a bit more.”
But he’s clearly not prepared to drop out. “I don’t hear European allies saying ‘Joe don’t run’,” he said. “I hear them saying ‘you’ve gotta win’… I think I am the best person to do the job.”
Despite warnings that Mr. Trump is on course to beat him, Mr. Biden still believes he can win, insisting: “I’ve got to finish the job.” If he keeps making catastrophic gaffes like this though, the question will be whether his party—and his family—will let him.
