Joe Biden took to the stage at his Thursday night press conference with everything on the line – his presidency, his re-election hopes, his political life.
If those were the stakes, he barely acknowledged them. He dismissed the concerns about his campaign that were posed again and again for a full hour by a room full of reporters, and promised that he was fighting not for his legacy, but to finish the job he started when he took office in 2021.
“If I slow down and can’t get the job done, that’s a sign I shouldn’t be doing it,” he said. “But there’s no indication of that yet,” reports BBC.
Depending on perspective, it was either a sign of dogged determination or of a man in denial about how dire his situation has become.
Minutes after the news conference finished, several more Democratic members of Congress publicly called on Mr Biden to step down, joining at least a dozen other lawmakers in the president's own party who have done so.
The question for Joe Biden's campaign is whether the floodgates will now open, or if the tide will hold.
The situation will not be helped by two excruciating gaffes that will be remembered by anyone who watched.
In his very first answer, he called his own Vice-President Kamala Harris "Vice-President Trump" – a painful faceplant in front of a national television audience.
That came just an hour after another headline-grabbing mistake at a Nato event, when Mr Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as "President Putin", prompting loud gasps in the audience.
Bd pratidin English/Lutful Hoque
