Top Democratic Party officials pushed President Joe Biden to debate former president Donald Trump in June as part of a strategy aimed at coercing the president to leave the 2024 race, the New York Post reported Monday, citing a source close to the Biden family.
“That debate was a set-up to convince Democrats that he couldn’t run for president,” the source told the Post.
That same source also alleged that party leaders threatened to push for the invocation of the 25th Amendment when Biden initially resisted calls to step aside and end his re-election campaign.
The individual close to the Biden family told the Post that Democratic Party heads had known for at least two years that the president’s health had declined.
“When I saw him a couple of years ago, it was frightening,” the unnamed source said. “He was just repeating slogans and had no idea who I was.”
Much of the reporting surrounding the fallout from Biden’s performance in the June 27 debate has dealt with questions over how much party leaders knew about the president’s condition.
The last time Biden met with House Democrats to discuss legislative matters was in October 2021, and Representative Dean Phillips (D., Minn.) — who challenged the president in the 2024 Democratic primaries — told the Wall Street Journal that the meeting “was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” a report published after Biden’s announcement notes.
Biden, attempting to convince congressional Democrats to support his infrastructure package, could not articulate his request of the lawmakers in the room, the Journal reported, leading then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), “visibly frustrated,” to spell out the president’s demands on his behalf.
Representative Adam Smith (D., Wash.) said he had raised questions with a variety of Democratic lawmakers and operatives about whether the party needed a new candidate in 2024 long before the primary process began.
He told the Journal that many with whom he spoke pushed back, arguing that a “messy primary fight” would weaken the party and allow Trump to cruise to victory.
Several Democrats told the Journal that they had been surprised by Biden’s debate showing because they had little contact with the president during his term in office.
One Democrat who recently took to the pages of a major newspaper to confess that he had noticed Biden slipping — though not an elected official — is actor and director George Clooney, who co-hosted a fundraiser for the president in June.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed earlier in July. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”