'I'm determined on running,' Biden tells press

(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden answered nearly an hour of questions at a potentially make-or-break press conference on Thursday, amid increasing pressure from Democrats for him to withdraw from the 2024 election over concerns about his age and fitness for office.

Biden, who began the press conference 57 minutes after its scheduled start time, opened with eight minutes of prepared remarks, which he read from teleprompters, about Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the economy, border security and a potential Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal that he first outlined in May.

“That framework is now agreed on by both Israel and Hamas,” Biden said. “I’m determined to get this deal done and bring an end to this war, which should end now.”

Speaking at the conclusion of NATO’s 75th anniversary summary in Washington, Biden frequently struck a defiant tone and insisted he was staying in the race.

“I’m determined on running,” the president said.

Asked if poor polling data could convince him to stand aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden said “no.”

“Unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win,’” Biden added, his voice then dropping to a deliberate whisper. “No one’s saying that.”

Biden’s foreign policy command during the press conference may reassure wobbly supporters that he remains fit for four more years in office, but many of his answers were jumbled, included factual errors or trailed off.

“I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be president,” Biden said, in response to a question about whether Harris was ready to defeat former president Donald Trump if she were to become the presidential nominee.

Asked what had changed from when he said in 2020 that he would be a “bridge candidate” to a younger generation of Democratic leaders, Biden claimed that historians credit him with accomplishing more than any president since Lyndon Johnson before seeming to lose his train of thought. (Johnson was president from 1963 until 1969.)

“Is tomorrow, if you, if we had a circumstance where there was a lineup and I didn’t, hadn’t inherited what I did, and we just moved things along—anyway, it’s going to change,” Biden said.

Biden also responded to claims suggesting that he had curtailed his daily schedule as he’s grown older and alluded to leaks that he increasingly relies on his inner circle, including his wife Jill Biden to protect his public image.

“What I said was, instead of my, every day, starting at seven and going to bed at midnight, it’d be smarter for me to pace myself a little more,” Biden said. “Next debate, I’m not going to be traveling in 15 time zones a week before.”

“Even with that, I love my staff, but they add things. They add things all the time,” Biden added. “I’m catching hell from my wife.”

In multiple questions about Israel, Biden made dubious claims about the attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians towards his presidency and the war against Hamas.

“There is growing dissatisfaction in the West Bank from the Palestinians about Hamas,” Biden said. “Hamas is not popular now.” (The Biden administration refers to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank.”)

A June poll of Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria found that 75 percent of Palestinians were satisfied with Hamas’s conduct of the war and a majority thought the terror group was the “most deserving” to lead the Palestinian people.

Biden also said that he was more popular in Israel than he is in the United States, where most polls have Trump leading both nationally and in key battleground states.

“My numbers are better in Israel than they are here,” Biden said. “But then again they’re better than a lot of other people here too, but anyway.”

A JNS/Direct Polls survey of the Israeli public found that 55 percent of Israelis would like to see Trump win compared to just 34 percent who would prefer Biden.

Asked if he had any regrets about his administration’s response to the war against Hamas, Biden cited the $230 million Gaza logistics pier, which was intended to ship U.S. aid from Cyprus to the Palestinian enclave but is due to be scrapped amid repeated malfunctions. 

“I’ve been disappointed that some of the things that I’ve put forward have not succeeded as well, like the port we attached on Cyprus,” he said. “I was hopeful that would be more successful.”

A growing number of elected Democrats and Democratic donors have either called directly for Biden to step aside or said they would go along with whatever the president decided to do without firmly backing his candidacy.

Coming into the press conference, 14 congressional Democrats had issued explicit calls for Biden to withdraw from the race after the first presidential debate against Trump on June 27.

Biden’s halting, jumbled and at-times difficult to hear answers during that debate seemed to demonstrate a marked decline in the abilities of the oldest president in the nation’s history.

Since the debate, Biden’s fitness for office has remained at the center of the national news cycle driven by further gaffes, aggressive denials from White House officials and Biden-Harris re-election campaign and lackluster follow-up appearances in the media.

On Thursday shortly before Biden’s press conference, the president referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin.” After a brief moment, Biden corrected himself.

The Biden-Harris campaign’s rapid reaction team attempted to spin the president’s apparent mix up by using punctuation to suggest it was deliberate.

“President Biden: Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin. President Putin? He’s gonna beat President Putin,” the campaign wrote. 

Asked about that moment in the press conference, Biden seemed to contradict his campaign by saying that it was a brief mix up that he corrected.

“I was talking about Putin and I said, ‘And now,’ at the very end, I said, ‘Here,’ I mean, ‘Putin,’ I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I mean Zelenskyy,’ and then I added five other names,” Biden said.

At press time, three additional congressional Democrats have called on Biden to withdraw from the race following the press conference, bringing the total to 17.