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 Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesFrom the moment Joe Biden walked (sort-of) on stage you sensed that this might not be his night.
After five minutes no-one was in any doubt. But should we be surprised? Thursday night's catastrophe was the culmination of an abysmal campaign to date by Biden.
When Ezra Klein of The New York Times suggested, in February, that Biden should be replaced as the Democrats' candidate he cited this as one key reason: "The presidency is a performance. You are not just making decisions, you are also acting out the things people want to believe about their president—that the president is in command, strong, energetic, compassionate, thoughtful, that… the president has it all under control."
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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The official also said President Biden was committed to attending the next presidential debate in September.
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The first 2024 presidential debate between President Biden and former President Trump was held on Thursday night. It marked the first time a sitting president debated a former one. It also marked the two oldest candidates ever to run for president, with a combined age of 159. The 90-minute discussion hosted by CNN was more of an incoherent debacle than any substantive debate. Biden was halting and disjointed. He was hard to hear, muffled his lines and often appeared to lose his train of thought. Meanwhile, Trump repeatedly lied — his false claims not challenged by CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. "Joe Biden really failed to rise to this moment," says Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation. "I expected nothing great, but it was so much worse."
We also speak with Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the co-founder of RootsAction.org, which sponsors the "Step Aside Joe!" campaign. He says Biden's performance in the debate showed "he is clearly impaired" and unable to defeat Trump, which is "a gift to the extreme right wing."
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 Tommaso BoddiLet's start with the obvious: No one actually knows the best path forward for the Democratic Party in 2024, and all options in front of us are bad. A second Biden term is seeming less and less likely, and Democratic voters and pundits like seem increasingly nervous that we're marching to our own funeral. But the prospect of challenging an incumbent president just a few months before an election also seems hubristic and dangerous, especially when the Democratic Party is deeply divided, the vice president is unpopular and has been largely marginalized, and there is no obvious Plan B. The worst of all worlds seems to be a scenario in which Biden continues his campaign but the party mutinies and an ugly replacement battle fails at everything except mortally injuring an already-weak candidate.
It is hard to overstate the stakes of this election. Joe Biden surely understands them as well. Which is why I hope that, in the aftermath of this debate, he is doing some serious soul-searching with his advisors, his colleagues, and the person he seems to trust most: His wife Jill.
The catastrophic debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Thursday was a wake-up call even for many hard Biden partis
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