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President Joe Biden dismissed mounting concerns within his party over his age and ability to run for reelection, insisting in an interview Monday that he is showing Americans that he has “command of all my faculties.”
“I’m old,” he told NBC News’ Lester Holt in a sit-down that at times grew combative. “But I’m only three years older than [Donald] Trump, number one. And number two, my mental acuity has been pretty damn good.”
The roughly 20-minute session, which NBC said was aired unedited and in full, marked Biden’s second TV interview in the past 10 days, as the president tries to allay worries about his fitness that were raised by a halting, disastrous debate performance late last month.
Since then, more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have called for Biden to drop out, with some worrying that he no longer has a path to victory in November.
But Biden on Monday expressed visible frustration with the ongoing scrutiny of his candidacy, arguing that he’s proven during his term and in the days since the debate that he remains up for the job.
“What I’m doing is going out and demonstrating to the American people that I’m in command of all my faculties, that I don’t need notes, I don’t need teleprompters. I can go out and answer any questions at all,” he said.
Biden flatly ruled out any idea that he’d rethink his decision to stay in the race, waving away arguments that he risks damaging his legacy by continuing on or the public comments from senior Democrats that they’re waiting for Biden to make a decision.
“The job’s not finished,” he said. “Fourteen million people voted for me to be the nominee in the Democratic Party, okay? I listen to them.”
Biden also maintained that the race remains just as winnable as before the debate, telling Holt that polling shows “there’s no wide gap between us. It’s essentially a toss-up race.”
As for whether Biden is at risk of suffering another meltdown similar to what voters saw on the debate stage, Biden offered a simple retort: “I don’t plan on having another performance on that level.”
Biden during the interview occasionally trailed off or changed subjects mid-sentence, moments that are not likely to do much to reassure Democrats who doubt he can mount the forceful campaign necessary to beat the former president.
Asked whether he had spoken with former President Barack Obama recently, Biden said they hadn’t talked in “a couple weeks” — but then struggled to recall whether that conversation had happened after the debate.
“I don’t think— I may have, I don’t think so,” he said.
Biden also declined to open the door to another debate with Trump before September, saying that he would “debate him when we agreed to debate.”
But the president, who has spent the intervening weeks since the debate ramping up his travel and taking on more unscripted events, repeatedly pushed back on the questions about his abilities, complaining that Trump had not received any kind of similar attention.
“Why don’t you guys ever talk about the 28 lies he told,” Biden said, referencing Trump’s debate performance. “Where are you on this? Why doesn’t the press ever talk about that?”
Biden at other points sought to turn the focus toward Trump on his own, resuming his attacks on the GOP after a brief pause in the campaign following Saturday’s assassination attempt. He dismissed suggestions he should scale back his characterization of Trump as a threat to democracy, and tried to draw a distinction between his rhetoric and an atmosphere of “viciousness” on the right that he accused Trump of encouraging.
“It matters whether or not you accept the outcome of elections, it matters whether or not you, for example, talk about how you’re going to deal with the border instead of talking about people being vermin,” Biden said. “That’s the kind of language that is inflammatory.”
He also seized on Trump’s selection earlier Monday of Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate to cast the Ohio lawmaker as a loyalist and enabler of Trump’s agenda.
“J.D. Vance has adopted the same policies: no exceptions on abortion, making sure he supports a new $5 trillion tax cut that Trump wants to give in the next administration,” Biden said.
Still, he couldn’t resist nodding briefly toward Vance’s past harsh criticism of his new running mate, urging Holt to “see what he said about Trump.”
Biden also criticized the dismissal of a criminal case against Trump over his handling of classified documents, tracing the decision to the Supreme Court’s recent extension of immunity for certain presidential acts, and a concurring opinion authored by Justice Clarence Thomas that he said set the stage for such an outcome.
“The basis upon which the case was thrown out I find specious, because I don’t agree with what Clarence Thomas’s dissent and/or the Supreme Court decision on immunity,” he said.
Pressed, though, on whether those setbacks would dent his case against Trump as unfit for office, Biden insisted it wouldn’t change his approach.
“I can talk about what I think is appropriate,” he said. “I think the justices that he appointed have in fact been the most conservative and, I would argue, if you check surveyed constitutional scholarship, they seem out of touch with what the founders intended.”
For Biden, it was one of the few subjects during the tense sitdown that he appeared to feel was appropriate to be asked about.
“Sometime, come and talk to me about what we should be talking about,” Biden said at the end of the interview. “Okay? The issues.”
