President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race is becoming “less likely” every day, historian Douglas Brinkley told MSNBC Thursday.
Multiple Democrats have called on Biden to end his reelection campaign following the president’s poor performance in a June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump hosted by CNN.
But Brinkley said that Biden is “less likely” to pull the plug on his reelection bid as time goes by.
“There’s a residual anger from many journalists that Biden doesn’t hold enough press conferences, that he doesn’t make himself more available. That’s been an ongoing narrative,” Brinkley told MSNBC host Chris Jansing.
Brinkley said Biden’s solo press conference after the NATO summit Thursday evening — which the White House referred to as a “big boy press conference” — will be a crucial test for the 81-year-old president.
“It’s like a station he’s got to go through tonight and get a passing grade and then, of course, with Lester Holt in Austin on Monday,” Brinkley said.
“And meanwhile, Biden is eating up clock. The Republican convention is kicking in in Milwaukee, and every day that this gets kicked further down, it’s less likely of Biden pulling out,” Brinkley added.
WATCH:
The Democratic National Committee has planned to nominate Biden in a virtual roll call to ensure the president meets an August 7 deadline to qualify for the general election ballot in Ohio, CNN reported.
“I will just end by saying Kamala Harris is part of any scenario here… he is in his 80s and you have to imagine if Biden and Harris win, that she… the public wants to have confidence in her ability to lead and she’s doing really well on the campaign trail right now,” Brinkley said.
Biden’s age and mental fitness were issues dogging the president’s campaign before the June 27 debate. On multiple occasions, Biden said he spoke with people who had died, including claiming to have spoken with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and former French President Francois Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996, on two occasions in February.
In September 2022, Biden asked for Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana at a conference on hunger. Walorski was killed along with two staffers in a motor vehicle accident in Indiana several weeks prior to the event.
