Joe Biden on Friday plunged into a frantic public relations blitz aimed at salvaging his floundering candidacy from the disarray sparked by last week’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, even as further revelations emerged to fuel concerns about whether he is suffering a mental decline.
In the latest worrisome sign for Biden’s campaign, a report emerged Friday afternoon that Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, is looking to assemble a group of Democratic senators to ask the president to drop his re-election bid.
According to the Washington Post, Warner has told colleagues that Biden cannot remain in the race, while the senator’s spokesperson would not confirm or deny that characterization of his recent conversations. Warner’s office did not return the Guardian’s request for comment.
In what is likely to be the most decisive set-piece event of his presidency, aside from the debate itself, Biden will sit for a television interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, aiming to dispel the growing perception that he lacks the acuity to continue in office for another four years.
The interview will be aired in full in prime time on Friday evening.
Biden gave a campaign rally on Friday afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin, where he said “I’m running” and that he was going to “win again”. He plans to give another rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, as the White House insisted he would keep up an aggressive schedule and go “full throttle”.
This is despite Biden already being the oldest president in US history at 81 and admitting this week that he needed to get more sleep and scale back evening events.
The president’s campaign has also launched a $50m advertising campaign this month, following its record-breaking $127m fundraising haul in June.
The offensive comes ahead of another potentially hazardous test: next week’s Nato summit in Washington, where Biden is slated to hold an unscripted news conference – a rare event during his three-and-a-half-year presidency, which has seen him stage the fewest press conferences of any president since Ronald Reagan.
But some major donors are now holding back, and on Friday afternoon, the Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, a prominent Democratic campaign surrogate, issued a statement saying that she urges Biden to “listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump”, adding: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes.”
The New York Times previously reported via anonymous sources that Healey called his campaign to be president for a second term “irretrievable”, as more politicians expressed doubts, on or off the record.
Meanwhile, the most senior Democrats in Congress, the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, continue to back Biden even as he said he “screwed up” at the debate, and as he continues to slip in the polls.
The White House confirmed that Biden had been examined by his physician since last week’s debate with Trump, contradicting earlier assertions, because he had a cold after intensive foreign travel, and said he was healthy.
New York magazine on Friday cited a recent incident where Biden reportedly failed to recognise a longtime acquaintance and Democratic party donor until prompted by his wife, Jill, who whispered in his ear and told him to say “hello” and thank them for a generous donation. Other longtime friends of Biden and his family were said to be shocked at instances where he could not remember their names.
A separate report from Axios said three White House officials – the deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini; the first lady’s top adviser, Anthony Bernal; and longtime aide Ashley Williams – would regularly remind the president of the names of people who he has known for a long time.
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“Annie, Ashley and Anthony create a protective bubble around [Biden],” an unnamed White House source was quoted as saying, adding that “he’s staffed so closely he’s lost all independence”.
The White House hit back. “These are standard processes for any White House, regardless of president or party. The claims about these individuals – whose professionalism and character are respected across the administration – are inaccurate,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, in response to the Axios report.
A group of Democratic governors who met with Biden at the White House on Wednesday ostensibly backed him, despite him joking about his brain and, it later emerged, saying he needed to scale back work and sleep more.
In the lead-up to the ABC interview, Biden gave two radio interviews which aired on Thursday. Speaking to a Philadelphia radio station on Thursday, he twice garbled his words, saying at one point: “I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice-president, first Black woman, to serve with a Black president,” and later that he was proud to be “the first president [who] got elected statewide in the state of Delaware” – a remark that may have intended to convey that he was the first Catholic to be elected statewide in Delaware, Politico reported.
The weekend’s offensive follows a calamitous seven days that have been the most fraught of Biden’s presidency – and arguably of his half-century-long political career – triggered by the 27 June debate performance, when he repeatedly lost his train of thought.
That episode sparked a firestorm of fevered debate among senior Democratic figures and donors about whether Biden should step aside as the presidential candidate, paving the way for an open nomination contest at next month’s national party convention.
While Biden tried to dismiss the performance as “one bad debate”, the continuing fallout has led to an erosion in his poll numbers against Trump, with even formerly safe Democratic states now appearing vulnerable.
The fight to prevent a second Trump presidency was given renewed urgency last Monday by a landmark US supreme court ruling, in a case brought by Trump, that gave former presidents broad immunity for alleged crimes committed under the mantle of official acts while president. Following a scorching dissent from liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor, Biden condemned the ruling, saying Trump would be “emboldened” if he won November’s election.
Trump, meanwhile, has remained relatively and uncharacteristically quiet about his rival’s predicament, although on Thursday a video emerged of Trump, sitting on a golf cart beside his youngest son, Barron, predicting that Biden would end his campaign, to be replaced as the Democratic candidate by Kamala Harris. “She’s so fucking bad,” the presumptive Republican nominee added.