Texas Rep. Democrat Lloyd Doggett First MP to Ask Joe Biden to Withdraw
Democratic heavyweights and congressmen on Tuesday, July 2, questioned the suitability of President Joe Biden, 81, for a second term, with the first public call for him to withdraw his candidacy. “Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I look forward to him making the difficult and painful decision to withdraw,” Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat member of Congress said in a statement. “I respectfully ask you to do so,” added Doggett, the first MP from the party to publicly ask him to throw in the towel.
“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a state?'” Nancy Pelosi, 84, a former Democratic speaker of the US House of Representatives, told MSNBC. She is referring to Biden’s disastrous debate last Thursday against Republican Donald Trump, 78, in which the Democrat repeatedly stumbled and lost his thread, exacerbating fears about his mental acuity. Since then, Democratic leaders have been hesitant, perhaps to give Biden a chance to calm concerns with a press conference without a teleprompter (a device that allows people to read a text without looking away from the camera), or a long interview, which he will give on Friday, according to ABC News.
Democrats’ patience is running out. “We have to be honest with ourselves and say it wasn’t just a horrible night,” Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley told CNN on Tuesday. A poll released Tuesday by CNN has further fueled fear in the Democratic camp: 75% of voters surveyed believe the party would have a better chance in November with another candidate. Trump has 49% of the votes nationwide, compared to 43% for his rival, a difference that has not changed since the last poll of this type, carried out in April. Vice President Kamala Harris, though she would not win, would be in a better position, with 45% to the former Republican president’s 47%. Other potential Democratic candidates, some of them little known to the public, would face Donald Trump with scores similar to the current president’s, despite their lack of notoriety, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
“I blame the campaign team for ignoring the questions people are asking,” said Senator Peter Welch in an interview with the Semafor website. Recent articles, notably from Axios and Politico, speak of a president who would only be fully functional between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and who would only read written memos to avoid gaffes. Since his election, the oldest president in US history has suffered a noticeable physical deterioration. The White House has so far consistently dismissed questions about Joe Biden’s intellectual acumen. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation into the octogenarian’s “decline” earned the paper a reprimand from its communications team. The US president, who has fallen several times in public, has stopped using the long gangplank of his plane for months. He prefers a shorter and more stable ladder.
For several weeks now, he has also surrounded himself with advisers as he travels from the White House to his helicopter on the lawn, which prevents the cameras from recording his very stiff gait. The gaffe-prone US president has not given a lengthy press conference since January 2022 and has reduced the number of impromptu remarks he makes to reporters. The Democrat spends most of his weekends at one of his homes in Delaware, with no official schedule. When Joe Biden recently visited France to commemorate the Allied landings of 1944, he went straight from the airport to his hotel, where he stayed for a whole day, without making any public appearances.
