Although Joe Biden’s symptoms are mild, the diagnosis takes him away from the campaign.
President Joe Biden cannot rest.
The president’s hopes of counterscheduling the Republican National Convention were dashed Wednesday after he learned he had contracted COVID-19, forcing him to cancel an appearance before a prominent Latino advocacy group.
Although Biden’s symptoms are mild, the diagnosis takes him away from the campaign and puts his health back in the spotlight – all at a critical time when he is desperately trying to prove that concerns about his age and mental acuity are exaggerated.
On Wednesday morning, Adam Schiff — the California congressman and Democratic nominee in that state’s U.S. Senate race — restarted the drumbeat of allies calling for Biden to drop out of the race, urging him to “pass the torch.”
Then came two reports from ABC News and the Washington Post that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had warned Biden in private conversations last week about the risk that his continued candidacy represented.
Biden told leaders he was the party’s nominee and planned to win, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. Still, both joined forces in the following days to lobby the Democratic National Committee against a virtual roll call vote in July that would have cemented Biden’s nomination and effectively ended efforts to replace him at the top of the ticket.
The president further fueled the melodrama by suggesting in a BET interview recorded on Tuesday that he would consider dropping out of the race if new health problems arose. However, Senator Bernie Sanders, the president’s defender, admitted in an interview with the New Yorker that Biden had difficulty completing sentences.
Worse still, Biden’s struggles took place in scenes from the Republican Party convention, where Republican nominee Donald Trump appeared on stage for a stroll sporting a bandaged ear from the botched assassination attempt he survived last weekend.
Trump’s defiant and aggressive response to the shooting proved instantly iconic, galvanizing voices of doubt within the Republican Party behind his cause. On Tuesday night, former primary foes Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis took the stage in Milwaukee to make their case in support of Trump’s candidacy.
The events contributed to a growing feeling that two campaigns were heading in opposite directions: one on the rise and the other in turmoil.
Public opinion polls highlight why Democrats are concerned.
Nearly two-thirds of Biden’s own party say he should withdraw from the race, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll released hours before Biden’s Covid diagnosis. Only three in ten Democrats are extremely or very confident in their ability to serve effectively as president.
Off the rails
Biden hoped to reverse those perceptions during a three-day trip that quickly went off the rails.
The president originally planned to travel Monday to Austin, Texas, to deliver remarks marking the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. The White House saw the speech as an opportunity for Biden to tie in with previous Democratic efforts to expand protections for minorities while painting Trump as allowing new restrictions on abortion and voting rights.
But that event was canceled after Saturday’s shooting at Trump’s rally, and a planned NBC News interview was moved to the White House. Without the event as a backdrop, the interview devolved into a tense and combative exchange focused primarily on Biden’s rhetoric and questions about his age.
“One day, come talk to me about what we should be talking about,” Biden told NBC anchor Lester Holt at the end. “OK? The problems.”
Biden resumed campaign events Tuesday with an appearance at the NAACP national convention, but quickly botched the centerpiece of his speech: a new proposal to cap rent increases by corporate landlords at 5% annually.
Instead, Biden appeared to have difficulty reading his teleprompter, eventually saying the limit would be $55.
Medical condition
After the event, BET News released excerpts from an interview with Biden, where he appeared to open the door to reconsidering his re-election bid if doctors advised.
“If I had some medical condition that came up, if someone, if doctors came to me and said, you have this problem and that problem,” Biden said.
On Wednesday, things didn’t improve. Biden spoke by phone with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood executive leading his fundraising effort, and was told that donations were slowing due to concerns about his age, Semafor reported. Katzenberg later issued a statement to the media outlet calling it a “misreading of a private meeting.”
The president then recorded a radio interview for Univision, but left feeling unwell. A Covid test confirmed his infection and the president quickly returned to the Las Vegas airport to return to his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
The only positive news for the president was that his symptoms were mild, according to the White House: runny nose, cough and – appropriately – “general malaise”.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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