Following last week's disastrous debate with President Donald Trump, President Biden reportedly told allies that he knows he will have to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race if he is unable to turn things around in the coming days.
The 81-year-old president appears to be pinning his reelection fate on the ABC News interview and his campaigning in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over the holidays, The New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources.
“He said, if there are two more events, [the debate]”We're in a different position,” an ally told the outlet.
The report marks the first evidence that Biden is considering abandoning a second term bid, after he and his team repeatedly ruled out the possibility of running for a second term after the June 27 debate.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates on Wednesday called the Times report “categorically false.”
“If The New York Times had given us more than 7 minutes to comment, we would have said so,” Bates tweeted shortly after the article was published.
But one of Biden's top advisers, who was not named, acknowledged that as the incumbent, Biden “understands well the political challenges he faces.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) both met with Biden within the past 24 hours, according to Punchbowl News and Semaphore.
Representatives for Democratic leaders did not respond to The Washington Post's requests for comment.
Post-debate polls showed voters leaning toward the 78-year-old Trump after Biden spent 90 minutes stumped and losing his train of thought in the first of two scheduled debates.
The White House initially blamed Biden's poor performance on a cold, but the president himself told donors on Tuesday night that the rigors of two overseas trips in early June had caused him to nearly fall asleep onstage.
But the revelation only raises new questions about Biden's fitness for the presidency, as he had spent the entire week preparing for the debate with his advisers at Camp David.
Meanwhile, sources told The Post on Monday night that anxious Democratic donors have given Biden two weeks to recover in the polls.
A source familiar with the campaign's conference calls with major donors said a drop in the poll numbers after that period would likely spark a new push to remove Biden from the running and replace him with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Additional reporting by Steven Nelson, Josh Christenson and Lydia Moynihan
