When President Biden appeared at a last-minute news conference Thursday night, he hoped to assure the country of his mental acuity hours after a special counsel’s report devastated him by calling him » elderly, well-meaning man with a bad memory.” »
Instead, a visibly angry Mr. Biden committed exactly the type of verbal stupidity that has made Democrats so nervous for months, falsely referring to Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as «the president of Mexico.» » as he tried to address him. the latest developments in the war in Gaza.
The special counsel’s report and the president’s evening performance have placed Mr. Biden’s advanced age, the singularly uncomfortable topic that threatens his re-election, at the center of the American political debate.
The 81-year-old president – already the oldest in the country’s history – has for years fought the perception that he is a diminished figure. “My memory is good,” he insisted Thursday from the White House.
Yet in a single sharp sentence, the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who had investigated Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, captured the fears of Democrats who hold their breath when Mr. Biden appears in public and the hopes of the Republicans. , particularly former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. The Trump operation made clear his intention to use Mr. Biden’s stiffer stride and sometimes garbled speech to portray him as weak.
The Biden campaign has built its strategy around telling voters that the November election is a choice between the president, regardless of public doubts about his age, and an opponent in Mr. Trump, 77 years, which they describe as a threat to democracy and personal life. freedoms.
Democrats have long sided with Mr. Biden. With no serious alternative in the primary race, many in the party believe the country’s future depends on the president’s ability to convince voters that he is a candidate for another four years.
But for all of Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities — the Republican Party has been on a long losing streak since he took office — the extra $2 billion that the Biden campaign and its allies hope to raise and spend won’t rejuvenate the current president . .
And Thursday night’s news conference was an example of the political dangers for Mr. Biden, whose missteps are amplified in part by the White House team’s tight control over his media visibility. His aides are so risk-averse that they even declined an interview before the Super Bowl this weekend in front of one of the largest annual television audiences in the country.
“Fair or not, you can’t ring the bell,” said David Axelrod, the former Barack Obama strategist who became one of the leading figures in the Democratic Party, warning about how voters perceive Mr. Biden’s age. Mr. Axelrod said the special counsel’s report was so troubling for Democrats because it «goes to the heart of what is currently plaguing Biden politically, namely a widespread fear that he is not good enough.»
He added: “The most damaging things in politics are the ones that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions, and those are the ones that travel very fast. It is a problem.»
The Biden campaign declined to comment.
Legally, Mr. Hur’s report absolved Mr. Biden of criminal wrongdoing, announcing that there was not enough evidence to charge him. But Democrats took advantage of his loaded language — Mr. Hur also invoked Mr. Biden’s “diminished faculties with age” as something that would have been sympathetic to a jury — to accuse the special counsel, who was once appointed by Trump, with partisan motivations. .
For Republicans who want to oust Mr. Biden, the report and the president’s angry response came as a gift after several days in which their own dysfunction in Congress dominated the news. The Republican National Committee quickly created a graphic with the eight most brutal words from the report – “older, well-meaning man with a bad memory” – grafted onto the Biden campaign logo.
It doesn’t matter that the special prosecutor declined to charge Mr. Biden, when Mr. Trump’s more serious matter, whether he mishandled classified documents, remains among the 91 criminal charges he faces in four jurisdictions.
Yet Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top strategists, called the special prosecutor’s description of Mr. Biden “damning and defining.”
“The report confirms what Americans have seen on their television screens in recent years: an elderly man with a bad memory is leading America into a quagmire of wars, an inflationary disaster and a lack of opportunity for American taxpayers.” , said Mr. LaCivita. said.
Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat close to Mr. Biden, predicted he would receive more calls from “people expressing concern.” But he said he would respond by recounting his first-hand experiences with Mr. Biden, which he said demonstrated the president was “sharp, engaged and determined.”
Yet Mr. Biden’s confusion between Egypt and Mexico came shortly after some slip-ups last week regarding deceased European leaders. First, during an election campaign in Nevada, he confused François Mitterrand, a former French president who died in 1996, with the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. Then, on Wednesday, he mentioned twice having met in 2021 Helmut Kohl, former German chancellor who died in 2017, instead of Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.
Mr. Coons took lightly «the calls I get from panicked Democrats saying, ‘Oh my God, the president said X!’ I think, “And the former president said Y!” If you asked Donald Trump who François Mitterrand was, he would look at you and say, “What are you talking about?” »
Mr. Trump has made his own series of verbal stumbles – he recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and already confused the leaders of Hungary and Turkey – but polls show voters do not question his acumen. the same way as that of Mr. Biden. An NBC News poll released this week found that voters gave Mr. Trump a 16 percentage point advantage on the question of who was more competent and effective — a change of 25 points since 2020, when Mr. Biden held a nine-point advantage on this question.
Ms. Haley argued that a new generation would better serve the country and both parties. “The first party to withdraw its 80-year-old candidate will win this election! she wrote in a fundraising email Thursday.
Mr. Biden’s aides have privately stressed that suggestions that his memory is lost will not hurt him, because voters have already taken his age into account when considering whether to support him against Mr. Trump. Some of the president’s allies on Thursday dusted off a strategy used by former presidents facing investigations: attacking investigators by accusing them of partisan politics.
Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, said Mr. Hur had no expertise in judging Mr. Biden’s memory.
“The people writing this report are lawyers, not doctors,” Mr. Garcia said. “This person is a Republican who has found no evidence. He’s probably trying to harm the president politically.”
For many Democrats, the episode was an unwelcome echo as the 2016 election approached. James B. Comey, director of the FBI at the time, held a press conference that summer to declare that he would not wouldn’t indict Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, but he criticized her judgment anyway — then, months later, reopened his investigation in the days before the election.
“This, for many of us, brings back the 11 days before Clinton-Trump,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist, who predicted that Mr. Biden’s troubles would ease because the election remains far away. “The blessing for Biden is that he was old before this report, he will be old after this report. We all knew he was old.
The special prosecutor’s report was surprisingly blunt. He describes Mr. Biden’s memory as appearing to have «significant limitations,» calls an interview he recorded in 2017 «painfully slow» and says Mr. Biden does not remember some key dates of his vice-president. presidency or “the death of his son Beau”. »
In a letter to the special counsel, Mr. Biden’s lawyers called the numerous references to Mr. Biden’s memory “gratuitous,” as well as “damaging and inflammatory.” And Mr. Biden himself, with visible frustration, expressed disbelief that he did not know when his son had died: “How the hell does he dare bring that up?”
Representative Daniel S. Goldman, a New York Democrat and former federal prosecutor, said the attention Mr. Biden’s Mexico-Egypt case immediately attracted was a «perfect example of how age issues become completely exaggerated and disproportionate.
Mr. Biden remains almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. He easily won his party’s first election, and deadlines to qualify for the Democratic primary ballot have passed in about 80 percent of states and territories.
Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is Mr. Biden’s only remaining Democratic challenger in the primary, has attracted little support so far. Mr. Phillips said the special prosecutor’s description of Mr. Biden’s brief showed that «the President is not able to continue serving as commander in chief beyond January 2025.»
James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist, said negative perceptions about Mr. Biden’s age could not be seen as a distraction.
«The public doesn’t view his age as…it’s not a problem for Fox News,» he said in an interview after the news conference. “She’s not a Taylor Swift faking the Super Bowl kind of thing. So…I don’t know how you get by.
“The whole day,” he added, “confirmed an existing suspicion.”
Maggie Haberman reports contributed.