2024 Elections Archives - Ination

For Joe Biden, a career defined by proving the doubters wrong faces its biggest test

ination online — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:15:49 +0000

Joe Biden is betting on himself.

In the president’s telling, the pundits have always doubted him. The Washington class has always scoffed at his approach. He was never the darling of Democratic donors. The polls that show moribund approval ratings and widespread unease with his age don’t capture his true standing.

The defiance Biden has thrust into public view at the start of a critical week is a feature, not a bug.

“I’m getting frustrated by the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more,’” he said in a surprise call-in interview Monday on MSNBC. “Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”

Biden’s public comments, which echoed a Monday morning letter to Democratic lawmakers, revealed flashes of what animates the president and his team, now staring down a moment of peak political peril. His closest advisers have long carried a similar boulder-size chip on their shoulders, with ready examples of their boss being doubted, dismissed or derided over the years.

If Biden’s life has been defined by resilience in the face of immense personal tragedy, the consistent element of his hardly linear path to the Oval Office has been a relentless belief that at its core – whether on politics, policy or legislating – his approach will work.

Biden’s dug-in stance in the wake of the first presidential debate is not too surprising to those who know him well.

But it’s also led to frustration among Democrats – including some long-time supporters of Biden – who worry that the approach could create a blind spot at a moment when the stakes could not be higher.

Biden only served to exacerbate that frustration after his primetime ABC News interview last week, his first major effort to clean up his shaky debate performance.

The president, who has made defending democracy a cornerstone of his Oval Office tenure and framed his 2020 campaign against Donald Trump as a “battle for the soul of the nation,” was asked how he’d feel if he lost to the former president this fall.

“I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all, and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Biden said.

The answer stunned many Democrats who view Trump as an existential threat to the country and was particularly jarring coming from someone who has made that threat so central to his campaigns and presidency.

Biden has since repeatedly moved to underscore his view of the threat he says Trump poses – and his belief that losing is not an option.

But the answer compounded what some Democrats say is the biggest problem with Biden’s dismissal of their concerns about his ability to run and win a second term: reality.

“We all watched the debate,” a House Democrat who supports Biden told CNN. “This isn’t about questioning campaign mechanics or legislative strategy – this is a lot heavier than that.”

A candidacy at risk

As Democrats grapple with Biden’s immediate future in Washington, the campaign ahead looms large.

Biden was already trailing Trump in many polls before the debate. The deficits have grown wider since.

A clear party-wide desire to focus on, and elevate, Trump and the clear policy contrasts between the two candidates has been swamped by an issue that has bogged down Biden’s candidacy from the beginning: his age

As of Monday evening, six House Democrats had publicly called on Biden to step aside. A handful of major donors have done the same.

“We’ve got a good message,” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told CNN. “The president has shown he is not capable of delivering that message in an effective way.”

Democrats – both supporters and those still on the fence about his candidacy – have urged Biden to take clear steps to mollify the concern.

Biden’s shift to go on offense at the start of such a consequential week marked an important, if somewhat overdue, step in the right direction, said a Biden donor, who participated in a Monday video call with Biden and other top donors. “But I think it’s understandable that people are still shaken by what they saw.”

That group isn’t limited to elected Democrats and donors.

Multiple White House officials acknowledged to CNN they were taken aback by Biden’s debate performance, even as they made a point of noting that their access to him wasn’t exactly expansive.

Gripes about access to the president are hardly exclusive to the current West Wing operation. But the concern was notable in a White House where officials have long taken pride in subscribing to Biden’s “prove the doubters wrong” approach.

But the concerns underscored a level of uncertainty about the long-prevalent “us against the world” posture among his staff.

Quelling the anxieties

Biden has publicly acknowledged the party anxieties in the days since the debate.

“I have heard the concerns that people have – their good-faith fears and worries about what is at stake in this election,” Biden wrote in his letter to congressional Democrats. “I am not blind to them.”

But the acknowledgment has repeatedly been followed by the trait that so often frames his approach to doubters: defiance.

Several Democratic officials and donors who spoke with Biden in the wake of his listless debate performance told CNN there were flashes of that defiance in their calls with the president.

Among the dozens of fundraising emails fired off by the Biden campaign in the week after the debate were subject lines such as “The pundits have gotten everything wrong” and “Pundits and politicians.”

After a weekend of campaign events, Biden made abundantly clear that in his view, it was time to turn the page.

“The question of how to move forward has been well aired for over a week now,” Biden wrote in his letter to House Democrats. “And it’s time for it to end. We have one job. And that is to beat Donald Trump.”

The message, which came at a critical moment of the 2024 campaign, represented equal parts political necessity for the party and political necessity for the candidate.

It was also strategic.

Democratic lawmakers were set to return to Washington after the July 4 holiday and meet behind closed doors, where conversations would center on Biden’s political standing, fitness for a second term and whether they should mount an effort to push for a new nominee.

On Monday, many Democratic senators appeared to have settled on a posture of not weighing in definitively outside of pressing Biden and his team to take a more sustained and aggressive public approach.

Past is prologue

Biden’s explicit call to turn the page also carried with it an unequivocal message to those who questioned his candidacy.

He isn’t going anywhere.

Anyone who questions why that’s his position need only look back over the course of the past decade – or ask Biden’s closest advisers, who are quick to roll off a lengthy list of examples they see as clear evidence of his record of proving the doubters wrong.

As vice president, Biden’s deliberations about a potential 2016 campaign, undertaken in the wake of his son Beau’s death, were met with persistent if cautious resistance from Democrats eager to coalesce behind Hillary Clinton.

That the resistance came in no small part from advisers to President Barack Obama is something neither Biden nor his senior team have ever forgotten, particularly after four years of feeling consistently underestimated by some in Obama’s senior orbit.

“The increasing pushback made everybody a little bit angry, and a lot determined,” Biden wrote in his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” which recounted the process he and his close advisers pursued as they weighed a run.

Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign was all but given its last rites before a stunning turnaround in the South Carolina primary that was followed by a relentless march to the Democratic nomination.

Biden’s campaign strategy to largely stay off the campaign trail in the middle of a pandemic faced no shortage of doubters. He ended up defeating Trump by more than 7 million votes.

Several of the cornerstone laws that sit at the center of one of the most consequential legislative records for a president in decades once appeared on the brink of defeat – or defeated altogether. Then final deals came together in time to push through measures such as the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act.

The 2022 midterm elections were set to wipe out House and Senate Democrats alike as Biden’s middling approval ratings and persistently high inflation weighed down the party’s majorities in Congress.

Biden’s decision to give two major speeches on democracy in the closing weeks was panned by critics and many Democratic lawmakers as missing the real concerns of voters.

And yet when the votes were counted, Democrats had picked up a seat in the Senate and narrowly lost the House – outcomes that bucked historical trends and polls alike.

Exit polling showed that democracy was a top-of-mind issue for voters.

In a way, that experience, when taken together with Trump’s return to dominance atop the Republican Party, may have created inertia for the oldest president in US history as he weighed whether to seek reelection.

Despite the concerns over his age consistently reflected in surveys, Biden’s decision to run and the Democratic nomination process that followed were less the subject of intensive internal debate and more a formality.

Any time Biden was asked about those concerns, he had a two-word retort ready: “Watch me.”

Tens of millions of people did, and the result has been a candidacy on the brink in the minds of many Democrats.

Biden, who carries a core belief in his agenda, his record and his ability to defeat Trump again, is steadfastly not among them.

“The bottom line here is that we’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere,” Biden said on MSNBC. “I wouldn’t be running if I didn’t think I was the best candidate to beat Donald Trump in 2024.”

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Trump will speak at Moms for Liberty convention as the group’s power at the ballot box is in question

ination online — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:10:33 +0000

Donald Trump, in his third White House bid, has sought to reignite the cultural battles over education that erupted throughout the country in recent years, and on Friday, he will appear before the conservative parents group that helped spark the fight.

Trump’s visit to Moms for Liberty’s annual convention in Washington is the latest sign of the organization’s clout in the Republican Party just three years into its formation. The former president’s K-12 agenda closely adheres to Moms for Liberty’s intense efforts to ban the teaching and discussion of certain topics related to sexuality, gender and race.

But as Moms for Liberty’s influence in the GOP has expanded, several high-profile controversies and the group’s recent mixed record at the ballot box have raised doubts about the organization’s effectiveness, if not the palatability of its platform.

The latest setback came last week in Florida, home of the group’s first chapter. The Sunshine State is where the group racked up several early wins, pulling school boards to the right. It teamed up with Gov. Ron DeSantis to expand parental rights and embolden districts to remove more books from school libraries, especially those with LGBTQ characters and themes, sparking both national backlash and copycat legislation in other states.

But in local elections there Tuesday, of the 14 candidates backed by the organization, just three won outright. Five lost, and six are headed to runoff elections later this fall. Several of the defeats came in deeply red parts of the state and in counties where Moms for Liberty founding leaders hailed from.

Those who defeated Moms for Liberty-approved candidates said their victories represented a rejection of the politicalization of schools that burst out Florida.

“My message to voters was community over chaos,” said Liz Barker, who defeated an incumbent conservative for a local school board seat in Sarasota County who was close to Bridget Ziegler, one of the group’s founders. “There has been sort of this mythical conversation around Moms for Liberty and it would be wise to not underestimate them because we saw how quickly they wreaked havoc on a nation of school boards, but I don’t think we should live in fear of them either.”

Ziegler, who has led an anti-LGBTQ push in schools, became a focal point of criticism when it came out that she and her husband, then-Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler, allegedly engaged in a consensual three-way sexual encounter with another woman. At the time, Christian Ziegler was under investigation after the woman accused him of later raping her. The Sarasota Police Department did not charge him, concluding that the sex was “likely consensual,” though the state party did censure him and remove this authority.

Moms for Liberty’s electoral losses are not just in Florida. An analysis of the 2023 elections by the left-leaning Brookings Institution found fewer than one-third of school board candidates endorsed by the organization won their races, a drop-off from 2022, when Moms for Liberty had a higher success rate.

Jon Valant, who has studied the organization’s political influence as director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute, said the organization’s brand has seemingly become “more toxic” as the public grew more aware of its partisan politics and the culture wars it helped inflame.

Asked about Trump’s decision to address Moms for Liberty, his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to CNN, “No one has done more to make America strong and secure for our mothers and families than President Donald J. Trump.”

“As a new mom myself, I know how dangerous a Kamala Harris presidency would be for our children,” she added.

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice strongly pushed back against assertions that the organization’s influence is waning. The organization says it now has more than 130,000 members in 300 chapters across 48 states and it takes credit for helping pass 43 new laws in 12 states.

“The critics critique. It’s what they do,” Justice told CNN. “But our growth has been exponential.”

Evan Power, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said its candidates won’t change how they talk about education issues, calling it “a fight for our next generation.”

“We’re going to full speed ahead,” Power said.

A veer into national politics

Heading into the 2024 election, the group is planning to spend more than $3 million in key presidential battlegrounds with advertising criticizing the Biden administration’s education policies.

The shift in focus from school board races to national politics comes as the organization becomes increasingly entwined with the GOP and its vast network of aligned conservative groups.

Last year’s summit in Philadelphia drew most of the Republican presidential field, including Trump, who avoided many other party cattle calls. There, Trump shared his promise to give favorable treatment to public schools that elect their principals (a proposal that Justice said Moms for Liberty does not back).

Moms for Liberty had a noticeable presence in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention, including a panel near the convention site featuring DeSantis and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

It has also deepened its ties to the Heritage Foundation, a DC-based conservative think tank. Heritage has donated to the organization and is a sponsor of this weekend’s summit. Its leaders have appeared at Moms for Liberty events and vice versa.

Moms for Liberty was also among the 100-plus organizations involved in Project 2025, a Heritage-led plan for a second Trump term that includes a 900-page playbook. Trump and his campaign have fought aggressively to distance themselves from Project 2025 — despite the former president’s deep ties to many of its authors — as Democrats have warned voters against the groups more provocative and controversial proposals.

Several individuals with ties to Project 2025 will speak at the summit in DC that Trump will keynote Friday evening, including the Heritage fellow who authored the section on education.

While Trump has tried to put Project 2025 at arm’s length, his K-12 agenda is aligned with its plans to eliminate the US Department of Education, a proposal that Moms for Liberty supports as well. One of the panels Friday at the conference is titled: “What does it mean to Abolish the Department of Education?”

Culture battles

Other panels will focus on the cultural battles that helped launch Moms for Liberty from a group of Florida women in 2021 worried about pandemic school closures and protocols to a national operation at the forefront of the fight over education politics.

“Protecting Kids from Secret Gender Transitions in Schools,” and “History of Marxism” are on the agenda, as is a panel focused on Title IX, the landmark education law barring sex-based discrimination that the Biden administration has used to expand protections for LGBTQ children in schools.

Trump has leaned into these battles as he seeks a second term. On his campaign website, Trump has vowed to use executive power to target schools where teachers “suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body” and bar transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ athletics. He has vowed to get “left-wing indoctrination out of schools” — echoing a regular talking point of Moms for Liberty candidates.

Leavitt, in her statement to CNN, accused Harris of wanting to “allow boys to play in girls’ sports” and supporting transgender surgeries for minors.

Jennifer Jenkins, who in 2020 defeated a school board member in Brevard County, Florida, who went on to co-found Moms for Liberty, has helped organize the pushback against the group’s priorities in the Sunshine State. While she said she believes rhetoric like Trump’s isn’t moving most parents anymore, she said that in many respects, “the damage has been done.”

She spoke to CNN shortly after a school board meeting where members voted to remove two books from schools. A school board member objected to one of the books — an English translation of a Japanese book about a high school gay couple — in part because the book was read right to left, just as it would be in Japanese.

“Even if Moms for Liberty disappear tomorrow, these horrible backwards laws won’t go away over night,” Jenkins said.

Justice made clear Moms for Liberty isn’t disappearing any time soon.

“We are just scratching the surface of the changes we’re going to make,” she said. “American parents are hungry for reform and change.”

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Trump’s latest waffling on reproductive health shows he’s still struggling to find an answer for what he created

ination online — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:06:47 +0000

Donald Trump said Friday that he will not support a ballot referendum to expand abortion access in his home state of Florida just 24 hours after suggesting he might.

The rush to clarify his stance followed intense blowback from anti-abortion advocates online, leading to concerns among Republicans that Trump’s continued waffling on abortion might lose him some deeply religious voters in a tightening race.

The episode marked the latest illustration of Trump straining to navigate the new era of post-Roe politics that he helped create.

Trump, whose ever-evolving views on reproductive health have traversed every side of the debate, has long expressed concerns about the political fallout from the 2022 Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion. Though he has sought credit for installing the three conservative justices that tipped the court to overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump earlier this year said future questions about access should be left to the states.

That position, intended to end the conversation, has done anything but, and Trump has struggled to appease activists in his party as he stares down an electorate that remains overwhelmingly troubled by the current state of abortion access in many GOP-led states. A new survey from Quinnipiac University found 55% of voters think Vice President Kamala Harris is better equipped to tackle the issue, compared with 38% for Trump. Meanwhile, nearly 7 in 10 voters focused on abortion favor Harris over Trump, according to a recent CBS News poll conducted by YouGov.

A display of his unease came Thursday, when the former president infuriated religious conservatives with an inartful attempt to sidestep questions about a Florida referendum that will decide the future of abortion access in his home state. The campaign quickly clarified in a statement that Trump had not, in fact, picked a side.

Later that day, surrounded by steel and machinery inside a Michigan warehouse, Trump abruptly detoured from remarks on manufacturing to offer women a new incentive to vote for him: a promise for universal coverage of in vitro fertilization if he is elected. But senators in his own party, including his running mate, JD Vance, had defeated a bill with a similar provision earlier this summer.

Democrats, newly enthused by Harris’ rise to the top of the ticket, have doubled down on putting abortion at the center of their pitch to women in key states. The Democratic National Convention earlier this month featured emotional stories of women who couldn’t access potentially life-saving care when their pregnancies took a turn for the worse. On Friday, Harris’ campaign announced the launch of a 50-stop bus tour — starting in Trump’s backyard of Palm Beach, Florida — focused on reproductive health care.

Harris’ campaign also quickly responded to Trump’s proposal to mandate IVF coverage by arguing the GOP’s recently passed platform — heavily influenced by the former president – includes language supportive of states passing personhood legislation that would give 14th Amendment protections to life beginning at conception. Such laws could potentially make IVF procedures difficult in those states.

“Voters aren’t stupid,” Harris campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.

With the race tightening in critical battlegrounds, Trump has all but dared single-issue anti-abortion voters to sit out the election. He wrote on social media last week that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” Vance followed up in an interview by saying Trump as president would veto a federal ban on abortion even if one managed to pass Congress — a 180-degree turn from the former president’s past promise to sign national restrictions on the procedure into law.

Religious conservatives, some of whom accepted Trump’s “states’ rights” position as political pragmatism, have lately cautioned that Trump risks losing their support. Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action, responded online to Vance’s remarks by warning: “If you don’t stand for pro-life principles, you don’t get pro-life votes.”

“Trying to sound like a Democrat on abortion isn’t going to help Trump,” she said in another social media post. “It hurts him. It’s politically unwise and morally wrong.”

Trump’s efforts are further complicated by what’s happening in his home state of Florida, where abortion is now illegal in most cases after six weeks. Voters in the state — including the former president — will decide on the future of access this fall through a ballot measure that would make abortion legal in the state up to the point of viability, which many experts believe is around 23 or 24 weeks of a pregnancy.

Trump had repeatedly declined to weigh in on the referendum, but on Thursday, he told NBC that Florida’s six-week ban was “too short” and added that he would be “voting that we need more than six weeks.”

Then, in another turn on Friday, he told Fox News that he will be voting “no” when asked about the amendment.

“So I think six weeks, you need more time than six weeks. I’ve disagreed with that. Right from the early primaries when I heard about it, I disagreed with it. At the same time, the Democrats are radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation where you can do an abortion in the ninth month,” Trump said. “And you know, some of the states like Minnesota and other states have it where you can actually execute the baby after birth and all of that stuff is unacceptable. So I’ll be voting no, for that reason.”

During the GOP primary, the former president called the decision by then-rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign a six-week ban “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

Anti-abortion advocates interpreted Trump’s latest remarks to mean he intended to vote in favor of the referendum — though his campaign said that was not the case — and immediately vocalized their frustrations. Kristen Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said on X that her phone was “blowing up” with “volunteers who no longer will door knock for President Trump if this is not corrected.”

“If Donald Trump loses, today is the day he lost,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote in a social media post. “The committed pro-life community could turn a blind eye, in part, to national abortion issues. But for Trump to weigh in on Florida as he did will be a bridge too far for many.”

The cleanup for Trump’s campaign continued Friday, with Vance telling CNN that the former president will “make an announcement” soon on Florida’s referendum.

“I think what he’s saying is that he doesn’t like doing it at just six weeks,” Vance told CNN’s John Berman on CNN News Central. “Obviously, he’s going to make his own judgment on how he ultimately votes on the amendment.”

Trump’s comments quickly reverberated around Florida, where DeSantis is leading the Republican effort to defeat the referendum. Taryn Fenske, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, responded to a clip of Trump’s remarks about the state’s referendum by saying the proposed constitutional amendment was “extreme and must be defeated.”

DeSantis is actively raising money to fund a campaign in opposition to the amendment. The commitments he has received from Republican leaders include $100,000 from state Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson.

Simpson hosted a fundraiser for Trump on Thursday that Vance attended, a fact pointed out by Democrats.

“Donald Trump may be trying to hide his extreme Project 2025 agenda to outlaw abortion in Florida and across the country,” said Aida Ross, spokesperson for the party, “but JD Vance is making the Trump-Vance ticket’s anti-choice extremism clear, cozying up to an architect of Florida’s cruel abortion ban.”

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Inside Biden’s unprecedented exit from the presidential race

ination online — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:02:23 +0000

In the end, President Joe Biden exited the political stage in isolation.

After weeks of fighting for his political life – insisting he wasn’t going anywhere following a disastrous debate performance – the president’s about-face did not come in an Oval Office address or a speech on the campaign trail. Instead, it came in letter posted to social media as he recovered from Covid-19 at his beach house in Delaware.

It was a low-key way to reveal one of the most historic decisions in modern American politics, but time was not on Biden’s side to reach a decision or make an announcement. Never before has a president left a reelection race this close to Election Day – and for 24 days it seemed as if he were stubbornly planning to ride out the storm that followed the June 27 CNN debate in Atlanta.

He spent the three weeks after the debate repeating that he was staying in the race against former President Donald Trump. The president dug in. He insisted he could beat Trump. His inner circle shrank to his closest aides and family. He was forced to retreat to Delaware, where he reached a decision in the last day and a half, finally conceding that a man loyal to the Democratic Party for more than half a century was seen as a drag on the ticket.

But in the end, the pressure on Biden from party leaders, rank-and-file lawmakers and donors – and the polling showing the perilous and potentially insurmountable path Biden faced amid a growing deficit with Trump – ultimately proved too much. Described as being more isolated than he had ever been, Biden could not withstand the push behind the scenes and in public. The blunt reality became a chorus of voices calling for the president to exit the race, like a boulder rolling down a mountain that only picked up momentum with each passing day.

The president’s team wanted the June CNN debate with Trump – months earlier than typical presidential debates – to shake up a race that Biden was trailing. They succeeded, but not in the way they had intended.

Instead, Biden’s campaign unraveled over the course of the next 24 days. Everything the president and his team tried to do to calm Democrats’ fears simply failed to shed the perception that Biden’s age was too advanced, and his health too fragile, for him to stay in the race.

With two posts on X Sunday afternoon, Biden bowed out of the race and threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris, in the hopes of quickly coalescing their party and moving past the chaos that had engulfed Democrats since the debate.

It’s a high-risk, high-reward gamble for Democrats, resetting a campaign Biden was losing with a new nominee just 107 days before the election. It comes as Trump is at his strongest point in the campaign, coming out of a completely unified Republican National Convention with a base rallying around him after the attempt on his life.

How the decision was made

Biden’s final decision to leave the race was reached in the last 48 hours, a senior campaign adviser said, as he consulted family and top advisers by telephone while recovering from Covid. A source familiar with the matter said the plans to exit the race began Saturday night and were finalized Sunday.

The adviser said the president “was not dug in” but was studying the data coming in and became convinced he would “weigh down” the ticket and be a complication to defeating Trump.

Biden’s decision did not have to do with any medical issues, a senior White House official told CNN.

When Biden huddled with his two closest advisers Saturday, the information they provided on polling and where top Democratic officials stood underscored that a path to victory was “basically nonexistent,” according to another person familiar with the matter.

There wasn’t any single poll number, wavering Democratic official or fundraiser presented in the meeting with longtime aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti that pushed Biden toward his decision, the person said.

Instead, the information highlighted that the path back to a viable campaign had been severely damaged by declining national and swing-state poll numbers, along with party defections that were likely to rapidly accelerate. The information included polling and details gathered from outreach outside Biden’s inner circle.

Unlike 2015, when Biden wrote in his book “Promise me, Dad” that Donilon told the then-vice president he shouldn’t launch a 2016 bid for president as he grieved the death of his son Beau, neither aide explicitly told Biden he should get out of the race, according to the person.

Biden made clear before the end of the meeting that he was planning to pull out of the race and asked his aides to start drafting the letter he posted Sunday afternoon and preparing the plans for the rollout.

Still recovering from a Covid diagnosis, Biden remained at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, all weekend with his wife, first lady Jill Biden.

Biden did what he always planned to do before any crucial decision: He held a family meeting Saturday night. He has spoken to all of his family since making his decision to drop out of the race, and his daughter Ashley and son-in-law Howard drove to Rehoboth earlier Sunday, according to a source.

He confirmed that decision Sunday morning and, with Ricchetti by his side, started making calls to key players outside of his close-knit group of senior-most aides and family members, the other person familiar with the matter said.

Biden consulted only a very small number of close aides on the decision. Some members of his inner circle were left in the dark until minutes before he posted his announcement on social media, including one of his closest communications advisers, Anita Dunn.

Multiple sources told CNN that Dunn and a small group of senior aides became aware of Biden’s announcement in the minutes before the post. Many rank-and-file staff found out when the post came out. Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, were among Biden’s debate prep team and had faced the ire of the president’s family in the aftermath of the performance. A Biden aide disputed that her exclusion had anything to do with the debate, telling CNN that she, along with other top aides, was not in Rehoboth Beach, and that “the president told his aides that neither he or his family blame them for debate performance.”

Biden and Harris spoke multiple times Sunday ahead of his announcement, according to a source familiar with the matter. Biden also held separate calls with chief of staff Jeff Zients and campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon informing each of his decision.

In Washington on Sunday, Zients led a White House senior staff call with all assistants to the president in the midafternoon, as well as a call with members of Biden’s Cabinet. Zients is expected to hold an all-White House staff call Monday morning and to speak with political appointees across the executive branch.

But even his vice president, and pick to succeed him, didn’t find out until the day he announced his decision.

A ‘bad night’ changes the race

In the end, Biden was confronting an untenable path forward: More than three dozen Democrats had publicly called for him to exit the race. Party leaders had told him he couldn’t win. And the money was drying up from donors who said they felt betrayed by the lack of disclosure around the condition of Biden’s health.

“I don’t know one big donor who is going to write a check for $100,000 or more. And I know a lot of those guys,” one major Democratic donor told CNN before Biden dropped out.

Biden and his team tried to play off the debate performance as a “bad night.” He and his aides blamed the president’s overseas trip. He said he would debate again and do better. And he returned immediately to the campaign trail, traveling to North Carolina the following day and delivering an energetic speech while acknowledging his debate shortcomings.

“I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth,” Biden said.

Biden huddled with his family at Camp David the weekend after the debate for a previously scheduled get-together, during which they encouraged him to stay in the race.

But in Democratic circles, panic had already set in. The issue problem was plain as day: Biden’s biggest problem with voters was they didn’t feel he was up to the job for the next four years. The debate had confirmed their fears and brought Biden’s biggest political weakness to the forefront. No policy or statement or criticism of Trump could change that.

Even as Biden insisted there was nothing that could convince him to get out of the race, Democrats began laying the groundwork and keeping the door open to a change. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went on MSNBC, saying: “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, is this an episode, or is this a condition?”

Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas on July 2 became the first elected Democrat to call for Biden to withdraw. The following day, Biden met with a group of Democratic governors, telling them he needed more sleep and should stop scheduling events after 8 p.m.

On July 5, Biden sat down for an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, in an attempt to demonstrate he was able to keep campaigning. In the interview, Biden said only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to leave the race, a comment that angered many Democrats.

It was the first of several attempts from Biden’s team to put the president in the public eye and quell the growing discontent. All failed to do so.

Signs of trouble

After July 4, Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, quietly tried to gather a group of Democrats who would hold a meeting with Biden, potentially urging him to exit the race. The idea died, however, when the effort leaked.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a call with House Democrats over that weekend, during which several lawmakers said that Biden needed to step aside.

On July 8, Biden fired off defiant a letter to congressional Democrats saying he would continue his reelection bid. “I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump,” he wrote.

The calls for Biden to leave soon started coming from outside Washington. On July 10, George Clooney, penned a New York Times op-ed calling for Biden to step aside. Even more devastating for the president, Clooney said the Biden he saw at a June fundraiser was the same Biden the world saw at the June debate and that the president had declined since taking the Oval Office.

Pelosi also continued to raise questions about Biden, declining to endorse him in an MSNBC interview the same day as Clooney’s op-ed. “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” she said, even if that was a decision Biden had already seemed to have made.

Several news outlets, including CNN, reported that Pelosi and former President Barack Obama had privately expressed concerns about the future of Biden’s campaign.

On July 11, Biden held a solo news conference on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington. He opened the door a bit further to the possibility he could drop out, saying he would consider doing so if data showed he cannot win.

Biden also made several small verbal slip-ups, including calling Harris “Vice President Trump.” Earlier in the day, he had referred Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin,” before correcting himself.

After Biden’s news conference, a handful more congressional Democrats called for him to drop out, growing the number to 15. The list included Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who said he deliberately waited until after the NATO meeting.

That weekend, Biden met and held calls with various Democratic caucuses, including the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the moderate New Democrat Coalition. The call with moderate Democrats was tense, as Biden got into it with Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who bluntly told him that voters are concerned about his vigor and strength, especially as it is perceived on the world stage.

The president responded to Crow – an Army Ranger who served two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq – that he knows Crow is a Bronze Star recipient like his late son Beau, but that “he didn’t rebuild NATO.”

At one point, Biden told Crow, “I don’t want to hear that crap” in addressing the lawmaker’s concerns.

A brief respite from demands for Biden to exit doesn’t last

More Democrats had been expected to publicly call for Biden’s exit that weekend, but the chatter came to a halt in an instant when an attempted assassin’s bullet came within millimeters of killing Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.

The assassination attempt turned the political world on its head, draining the public focus on Biden’s ability to govern for a second term and turning it squarely onto the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear, raising a flurry of questions about how a gunman was able to shoot at the Republican nominee for president five days before he was to accept the nomination.

The pause would not last.

Behind the scenes, Democratic pollsters circulated memos showing Biden was on track to lose the election, and – importantly to congressional Democrats – damage candidates in ballot races, too. Some polling showed other Democrats outpacing Biden in battleground states.

“Lose everything,” was how one Democrat described a polling memo Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg had sent to Biden’s inner circle.

The dam reopened on Wednesday when California Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic Senate candidate and leader of Trump’s first impeachment, became the first lawmaker to join the public calls for Biden to withdraw from the campaign after the assassination attempt.

Schiff’s place in the party – as a potential soon-to-be senator and close ally to Pelosi – made his voice among the most significant to that point.

“While the choice to withdraw from the campaign is President Biden’s alone, I believe it is time for him to pass the torch,” Schiff said in a statement.

Party leaders deliver a blunt message

More voices soon followed. And arguably more importantly, the private pleas for Biden to leave the race became part of a public cacophony of voices urging his withdrawal.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland House Democrat who led Trump’s second impeachment, confirmed that he had written a letter to Biden on July 6 encouraging the president that there was “no shame in taking a well-deserved bow” out of the 2024 presidential election – and making his argument with comparisons to George Washington and Red Sox pitching great Pedro Martinez.

CNN reported Wednesday that Pelosi privately told Biden that polling showed he could not defeat Trump and that he could destroy Democrats’ chances of winning the House in November. Biden pushed back, saying he had seen polls indicating he could win. At one point, Pelosi asked Donilon, Biden’s longtime adviser, to get on the line to talk over the data.

That same day, ABC News reported that Schumer told Biden in their Saturday meeting that it would be best if he bowed out of the presidential race. And a person briefed on the meeting between Biden and Jeffries said that the Democratic House leader stopped short of calling on him to step aside – instead pinning the suggestion on his members.

The White House and congressional officers tried to tamp down the reports, issuing statements of denial. But the stories about the party leaders delivering Biden a message had their effect. On Friday, a dozen new Democrats released statements saying Biden should exit the race.

Among them: Another close Pelosi ally, Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California. A source with direct knowledge described Biden on Friday as “seething” at Pelosi, a sentiment that only grew in light of Lofgren’s letter.

Donors revolt, too

The public statements from Democrats illustrated one element of Biden’s challenge to stay in the race – but just as important were the defections from his donors that would have dried up fundraising in the home stretch of the campaign.

Major Democratic donors were skeptical of Biden’s viability, and multiple said their concerns had received an icy reception from Biden campaign officials.

“How do you think we feel?” a Democratic donor close to the Democratic National Committee and the White House told CNN before Biden dropped out, explaining the mood among donors. “We all feel betrayed that they were not honest with us about his health.”

Two sources told CNN on Thursday that furious donors were also telling House and Senate Democratic campaign committees they would freeze contributions unless and until party leaders took stronger steps to get Biden to step aside.

“Yes, that card has been played,” a senior House Democrat told CNN on Thursday night.

“They believe if Joe is at the top of the ticket, the House and Senate are gone, too,” said a Democratic strategist intimately involved in big-dollar fundraising. “They don’t want to throw good money after bad.”

Moments after Biden’s announcement, donors abruptly began reaching out to advisers, pouring in money, according to sources involved in the discussions. In the lead-up to Biden’s decision to exit the 2024 race, multiple donors had reached out to Harris’ team proactively to signal they would be willing to support her if she ran at the top of the ticket, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Stubborn resistance gives way

Up until the moment he dropped out, Biden and his team insisted he was staying in.

Biden’s team created a public schedule for the president over the past week that was intended to show his ability to stay in the race.

On Monday, he held another television interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, where he acknowledged his subpar debate performance while criticizing the media for focusing on his gaffes instead of Trump’s falsehoods. Biden again said he had no intention of stepping aside.

Biden then traveled to Las Vegas for campaign stops, speeches planned at the NAACP National Convention and the UnidosUS annual conference, and interviews with BET and Univision. Biden told BET News’ Ed Gordon that the only thing that would push him to reconsider his reelection bid would be a “medical condition.”

The president spoke at the NAACP conference, but before he could make his speech Wednesday at UnidosUS, he was dealt another blow: the positive Covid-19 diagnosis.

The president returned to his Rehoboth Beach home that day to isolate, his public schedule shuttered indefinitely while he recovered.

On Friday, Biden issued a statement that he would be back on the campaign trail the following week, while Biden campaign chair O’Malley Dillon went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to say Biden was “absolutely” staying in the race.

The campaign also put out a memo saying there was “no plan for an alternative nominee.”

Biden called some Democrats over the weekend who were out on TV on his behalf. Two told CNN that the president voiced his gratitude and then his anger at those who were trying to push him out. “There was some hurt in his voice but mostly anger,” one of the Biden loyalists said.

Even on Sunday, Biden’s team continued to publicly maintain he wasn’t going anywhere. South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a key Biden ally, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that Biden and Harris “have received over 14 million votes to be our standard bearers. That’s where we are,” Clyburn. The congressman’s 2020 endorsement of Biden ahead of the South Carolina primary was widely seen as instrumental in Biden’s victory.

Biden spoke to Harris on Sunday before announcing his decision, which came in two messages: The first saying he was dropping out, and the second endorsing his vice president to be the Democratic nominee.

Biden told his senior-most team he was getting out around 1:45 p.m., and the public letter went out right around then, a source familiar with the timing told CNN.

“Before that, it was all steam ahead that he’s running,” the same source said.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

CNN’s Kayla Tausche, Dana Bash, John King, Jamie Gangel, Betsy Klein, Sam Fossum, Manu Raju, Samantha Waldenberg, Donald Judd and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.

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As his campaign sharpens attacks on Harris, Trump remains fixated on Biden

ination online — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 05:38:05 +0000

As Democrats prepared for a deeply symbolic night to mark the passing of the generational torch, former President Donald Trump remained fixated on his former opponent.

Trump’s campaign has pushed sharply against Vice President Kamala Harris, launching a weeklong swing-state tour in tightly controlled environments with small crowds. The goal is to counterprogram the Democratic convention by leveling the kinds of policy-based attacks the former president’s allies have urged him to focus on in recent weeks.

But for Trump, who advisers say left the GOP convention confident of a comfortable victory in November, letting President Joe Biden go hasn’t been easy.

One adviser, asked if he expected Trump to watch Biden’s speech Monday evening, said simply: “Of course.”

He posts on social media about Biden’s decision to step down – and the Democratic pressure that drove the decision – with regularity. He frequently floated, with no evidence or credibility, the idea that Biden would try to step back into the race until a virtual Democratic roll call nominating Harris made that scenario impossible.

“I think he’s a little nostalgic for where things were a month ago,” said a Republican who has spoken to Trump in the last few days. “Understandably.”

Trump’s first battleground-state event of the week, in front of roughly 150 people in a York, Pennsylvania, manufacturing plant earlier Monday, marked a clear – if somewhat nonplussed – effort to stick closely to the economic and energy-focused remarks his advisers wanted him to give.

But Trump asked to add a section to the policy remarks a few hours before the event.

House Republicans had released a lengthy report making the case for Biden’s impeachment. After months of investigation, the report largely fell flat and contained no evidence that Biden, as vice president, had engaged in activities to benefit his son’s business partners.

Trump, however, insisted on adding paragraphs to his remarks summarizing his view of the findings.

“I said, ‘No, I want to talk about it, just briefly.’ It’s so sad, because he’s going to be making his speech tonight, and they don’t call him ‘Crooked Joe’ for no reason,” Trump said in York.

The former president also levied personal attacks against Harris during his speech and at one point focused on her father, Donald Harris, a retired Stanford University economist.

“He’s a Marxist professor. Can you imagine? Does anyone know that? I wonder if they knew that when they did an overthrow or a coup on Joe Biden. I wonder if they knew where she comes from, where she came from, what her ideology is. But you could see it a little bit by this wack job,” Trump said of Harris and her father.

The comments about where Harris “comes from” follow Trump’s repeated false attacks on the vice president’s racial identity. He falsely said last month that Harris – the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India – was “only promoting Indian heritage” and that she only recently “happened to turn Black.” Harris has long embraced and discussed her Black identity, while also honoring her Indian heritage.

Trump also attacked Harris’ laugh, which he has mocked repeatedly.

“Between his movement and her laugh, there’s a lot of craziness,” Trump said of Biden and Harris. “I’d say a step further than weird. Weird is a nice word by comparison,” the former president added, referencing the recent attack line from Harris and other Democrats that Trump and running mate JD Vance are “weird.”

As Trump stood on the floor of the manufacturing plant in York, seeking to portray himself as an ally of manufacturing workers, he said Harris’ economic policies amounted to a “regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America.”

Trump also falsely claimed that he “won” the classified documents case and that he was “totally exonerated” after US District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case against him. Cannon ruled last month that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges against Trump, violated the Constitution. But Cannon did not rule on whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper or not.

In a battleground state where natural gas drives much of the economy, the former president on Monday repeatedly attacked Harris over her past support for a ban on fracking, saying that she was “totally a non-fracker.” As an unsuccessful candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris backed a ban on fracking, but her campaign now says she no longer supports such a prohibition.

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