Biden’s candidacy in question after Democrats fall into ‘aggressive panic’ following weak, frozen debate against Trump

During his first — and possibly only — debate against former President Donald Trump on Thursday night, President Biden repeatedly froze and slipped up, sparking fear and anxiety in the Democratic Party less than four months before the general election.

In what may be the most replayed political moment of the night, week, month and perhaps year, the 81-year-old incumbent lost his train of thought for about nine seconds, looked down at his podium and then jumped back up to declare that he had “finally beaten Medicare.”

Biden, who would be 86 when his second term ends in January 2029, didn’t help that he spoke in a soft, raspy voice, which anonymous aides attributed to a cold he apparently caught while preparing for the forum in Atlanta for seven days away from the public eye.

The president began to lose control when he said he was committed to “making sure that every single person is entitled to what I was able to do with regard to COVID, excuse me, with, uh, dealing with everything we had to deal with” – before faltering.

“Look, we finally beat Medicare,” Biden concluded, looking up after an agonizing wait.

Not for the last time, 78-year-old Trump immediately took advantage of the faux pas, saying of his rival: “Well, he’s right. He defeated Medicare. He beat it to death and he’s destroying Medicare because he’s putting all these people who come in on Medicare.”

The debate was widely seen as a defining moment for Biden as voters worried about his mental health – a concern that suddenly increased on Thursday night.

“Low,” a Democratic source told the Post. “If I had known nothing about Donald Trump before this debate and judged him only on his performance, I would vote for him.”

Another well-informed Democratic source said it had not yet been decided whether Biden would still be the party’s nominee.

“Biden made a mistake. He saved Medicare. But now someone has to save Biden,” the source joked.

A third Democratic insider, asked for comment on Biden’s Medicare comment, offered no defense, saying only, “I don’t know what he meant.”

Biden stumbled repeatedly during the debate. For example, he said that the US economy had created “15,000” jobs under his leadership, that there were “a thousand trillionaires in America” ​​and that his son Beau “died in Iraq” and not – as actually happened – in his hospital bed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Biden seemed to lose control here too when he suggested he would impose a “total ban” on illegal immigration along the US-Mexico border, despite record numbers of illegal border crossings for three years since Trump ended his tough policies, such as forcing asylum seekers to leave Mexico.

Biden has released most illegal border crossers into the U.S. in recent months to await the outcome of a severely stalled asylum process, but he said he would “continue until we get a complete ban – a complete initiative relative to what we can do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.”

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” replied the comparatively disciplined and quick-witted Trump, “and I don’t think he knows what he said.”

At another point, Biden claimed that “the Border Patrol agents supported me” – to which the Border Patrol agents’ union hit back sharply at X: “To be clear, we have never supported Biden and we never will.”

Biden made his shaky performance even worse by making an obviously sexual joke at a gathering of his supporters after the debate.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you – I want to go home with you,” said Biden, who spoke for less than 30 seconds before passing the microphone to a DJ and walking off the stage.

For former Democratic New York State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, it was all too much. After the debate, she tweeted: “President Biden is a good, honorable man. He has much to be proud of. It’s time to resign and call off this candidacy.”

Other Democrats chose to report anonymously. CNN reporter John King opened the network’s post-debate coverage by describing a “deep, widespread and very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party.”

“It started within minutes of the debate starting — and it’s continuing to this day,” he added. “It involves party strategists. It involves elected officials. It involves fundraisers, and they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think is abysmal, which they think is going to hurt other people on the party ticket, and they’re having conversations about what they should do about it.”

Biden’s most likely successor on the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris, played the good soldier, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that her boss had “a slow start but a strong finish.”

“One can debate questions of style,” she added when Cooper pressed her. “I understand that you are aiming for an hour and a half debate tonight – I am talking about three and a half years of achievement and work that are historic.”

Republicans responded to Biden with both pity and ridicule.

“He is not fit to be president,” Trump said. “You know it and I know it.”

“As a geriatric nurse who has cared for so many elderly people with cognitive impairments, this is heartbreaking to watch,” tweeted Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans.

An ABC/Ipsos poll in February found that an overwhelming 86 percent of likely voters think Biden, who is trailing Trump in most swing state polls, is too old to run for another term. A Siena College/New York Times poll in March found that 73 percent of registered voters thought Biden was too old.

In fact, the debate touched on issues that are consistently of greatest concern to voters, including inflation and the economy, abortion rights, immigration and the state of American democracy.

Biden tried to blame Trump for inflation, saying the ex-president caused it “through his enormous mishandling of the pandemic” – to which Trump said Biden “inherited almost no inflation, and it stayed that way for 14 months. And then it exploded under his leadership because they spent money like a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing.”

On the issue of abortion, Trump said he welcomed the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow the sale of medication abortion drugs nationwide, and said states with such restrictions should allow exceptions in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother.

But Biden hit back when Trump claimed that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022 would be a “great thing.”

“What you did was terrible,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s nomination of three conservative judges. “It’s a bit like saying, ‘We’re giving civil rights back to the states, and each state is given a different role.'”

Elsewhere, Biden attacked Trump, citing his May 30 conviction in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels.

But when the president called his predecessor a “convicted felon,” Trump responded by saying that Biden’s son Hunter, 54, was convicted of federal gun crimes on June 11 and is now awaiting a second trial in federal court in Los Angeles on charges of alleged tax fraud totaling $1.4 million from foreign dealings in which he had often implicated then-Vice President Biden.

“He could be a convicted felon as soon as he leaves office – Joe could be a convicted felon, with all the things he’s done. He’s done terrible things,” the former president said, pointing out that Biden falsely denied the authenticity of files from Hunter’s laptop that linked him to business dealings in China and Ukraine.

Biden “is paid by China. He is a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China,” Trump said.

The challenger made his advantage clear in his closing argument, deriding Biden as an ineffective “whiner.”

“He talks about all this stuff, but he hasn’t done it for three and a half years,” Trump said. “We live in hell. We have the Palestinians and we have everyone else rioting everywhere.”

“The whole country is exploding because of you because they don’t respect you when they have to respect their president, and because they don’t respect you around the world,” the former president concluded. “We are a failing nation, but it will not fail anymore. We will do it again.”