Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington DC neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
The visit took place at the White House residence clinic on 17 January. Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
Biden has consistently rejected taking any cognitive test, including in August 2020 when he dismissed a reporter’s question with: “Why the hell would I take a test?” He has continued to dismiss the need for one and, according to aides, has not received one during his three annual physical exams during his term in the White House.
The Washington Post on Saturday reported a White House aide saying that O’Connor, who has been Biden’s doctor since 2009, has never recommended that Biden take a cognitive test.
Trump weighs in on Biden's candidacy
Donald Trump has broken his silence on the doubts swirling around Joe Biden’s candidacy following last month’s debate debacle with a characteristically mocking social post urging him to stay in the race.
“Crooked Joe Biden should ignore his many critics and move forward, with alacrity and strength, with his powerful and far reaching campaign,” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, wrote on his Truth Social site nine days days after the calamitous Atlanta debate that has left the president’s re-election campaign mired in crisis.
Mercilessly trolling the fears of worried Democrats, the post continued: “He should be sharp, precise, and energetic, just like he was in The Debate, in selling his policies of Open Borders (where millions of people, including record numbers of Terrorists, are allowed to enter our Country, from prisons and mental institutions, totally unchecked and unvetted!), to Ending Social Security, Men playing in Women’s sports, High Taxes, High Interest Rates, encouraging a Woke Military, Uncontrollable Inflation, Record Setting Crime, Only Electric Vehicles, Subservience to China and other Countries, Endless Wars, putting America Last, losing our Dollar Based Standard, and so much more.
“Yes, Sleepy Joe should continue his campaign of American Destruction and, MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN!”
The gleeful post was Trump’s first explicitly open comment on the saga that has thrown the Democrats into turmoil, with the exception of a video that emerged this week in which the former president appeared to predict Biden was about to withdraw in favour of Vice-President Kamala Harris, whom he disparaged in profane terms.
It was unclear whether Trump’s sarcasm-laden post expressing joy at a rival’s misfortune would have the blessing of his campaign strategists amid post-debate polling evidence suggesting that Harris would fare better than Biden in a match-up against the Republican candidate, which in turn fuelled a belief that the GOP would prefer a contest against the sitting president.
Fretting Democrats may see Trump’s mockery as further evidence of Biden’s comparative weakness and push harder for him to step aside.
In a Truth Social post this week, Trump referred to the vice-president as “laffin’ Kamala Harris” – in reference to her supposed personal trait of loud public laughter – while in a separate campaign statement he referred to her as Biden’s “cackling copilot”.
Updated
Biden’s career worst debate performance against Trump last month has triggered acrimony, angst and panic among Democrats just four months from election day.
There are growing calls for oldest president in US history to step aside in favour of Vice-President Kamala Harris or another candidate. But Biden has so far dug in and vowed to fight on.
It would be a hugely consequential decision for any party at any moment but the one thing that Democrats agree on is the stakes are uniquely high. America’s highest court has shifted right, thanks to three Trump appointees, and could indulge his authoritarian impulses should he be elected. A Trump victory would also have dramatic implications for Ukraine and other US allies.
“American democracy is facing a category 5 disaster here,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Trump critic. “Not just the election but the court. Unfortunately the Democratic party feels like it’s paralysed and refusing to acknowledge reality.”
Debate viewers were shocked because Democrats had created an alternate reality bubble, Sykes added. “It reminds me a little bit of what what the Republican bubble felt like a few years ago where people will say one thing in private but they won’t say it in public. In private people know that they have a real problem with Joe Biden, that it was a disaster, that it might not get better, but they’re unwilling to say that in public and right now that’s an untenable solution.”
California's Gavin Newsom campaigns for Biden in Pennsylvania
Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has been widely discussed as a potential successor to Biden, is campaigning for the president today in Pennsylvania’s Bucks county – a key political battleground.
The governor cast the election as one that is “about liberalism versus illiberalism” – highlighting the threats Trump poses to American democracy, and emphasizing Biden’s economic record.
As a campaign surrogate, Newsom has drawn a swirl of speculation about his own presidential aspirations. “I think what you’ve seen is this, what Gavin Newsom has to say is really not so different from what Joe Biden has to say,” Bill Whalen, a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California, told me recently. “But he takes Joe Biden’s message, and he delivers it much more effectively.”
Lloyd Doggett, a veteran Texas House member who had been the first Congressman to call for Biden to withdraw last Tuesday, said Biden’s ABC interview only reinforced his view.
“The need for him to step aside is more urgent tonight than when I first called for it on Tuesday,” he told CNN.
He added: “[Biden] “does not want his legacy to be that he’s the one who turned over our country to a tyrant.”
Mike Quigley, an Illinois congressman who was the fourth congressman to urge the president to stand aside - after Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Sean Moulton of Massachusetts - called aspects of the interview “disturbing”, adding that it showed “the president of the United States doesn’t have the vigour necessary to overcome the deficit here.”
Addressing Biden’s response to a putative Trump re-election, he told CNN: “He felt as long as he gave it his best effort, that’s all that really matters. With the greatest respect: No.”
Julian Castro, a former Democratic presidential hopeful and a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, acknowledged to MSNBC that Biden had been “steadier” than in his debate performance but was in “denial about the decline that people can clearly see.”
Tim Ryan, a former representative from Ohio - who has also urged a Biden withdrawal - echoed that sentiment, telling the same network: “I think there was a level of him being out of touch with reality on the ground.”
He also said: “I don’t think he moved the needle at all. I don’t think he energised anybody. I’m worried, like, I think a lot of people are, that he is just not the person to be able to get this done for us.”
Several Biden loyalists, including Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a chairman of his campaign, and John Fetterman, a senator from Pennsylvania, voiced their continued support. But even among supporters there were doubts.
Ro Khanna, a California congressman and Biden surrogate, issued a statement saying he expected the president to do more to show he has vigour to fight and win the election and “that requires more than one interview”.
“I expect complete transparency from the White House about this issue and a willingness to answer many legitimate questions from the media and voters about his capabilities,” Khanna said.
Updated
Swing state representative Angie Craig is the latest Democrat calling for Biden to exit
Representative Angie Craig, a Democrat of Minnesota, is among the latest to call on Biden to exit the presidential race.
“Given what I saw and heard from the president during last week’s debate in Atlanta, coupled with the lack of a forceful response from the President himself following that debate, I do not believe that the President can effectively campaign and win against Donald Trump,” she said Saturday morning.
Craig represents a swing district in suburban Minneapolis-St Paul. Some Democrats are concerned that Biden’s flailing candidacy could drag down House and Senate candidates down ballot.
“This is not a decision I’ve come to lightly, but there is simply too much at stake to risk a second Donald Trump presidency,” Craig said in a statement. “That’s why I respectfully call on President Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee for a second term as president and allow for a new generation of leaders to step forward.”
She called for “an open, fair, and transparent democratic process to select a new nominee”.
Updated
Congressional Democrats are to hold an emergency weekend meeting to discuss Joe Biden’s tottering presidential candidacy after a prime time television interview failed to dispel doubts triggered by last week’s debate fiasco.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, scheduled the meeting for Sunday even as Biden struck a defiant posture in Friday’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
In a 22-minute interview from a school library in Wisconsin aired in full, the president brushed off his miserable debate display as “a bad night” and insisted he would only withdraw his candidacy if the “Lord almighty” ordered it.
But his posture only reinforced the views of those Democrats who had already publicly urged him to quit the race, while others were privately infuriated by his seemingly insouciant attitude to the prospect of defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in November’s election.
Asked by Stephanopoulos how he would feel if he had to turn the presidency back to an opponent he and his party loathe, the president said: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
The response seemed to minimise the consequences of handing over power to a rival who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, incited a mob to attack the US Capitol and vowed to seek “retribution” on his opponents if he won again, a threat that has unnerved many Democrats.
The convening of Democratic House members by Jeffries followed a similar move even before Friday’s interview by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who called on fellow senators from his party to meet to discuss Biden’s candidacy. Warner has been reported to be leading an effort by senate Democrats urging the president to stand aside.
Updated
History may record them as eight days that sunk a presidency, or at least the rockiest road to a convention in living memory – a week that has left Joe Biden’s re-election bid hanging by a thread.
Here’s a timeline:
On Friday, high-profile neurosurgeon Dr Sanjay Gupta called on Biden to undergo neurological testing and release the results to the public, saying he and other brain specialists believe a detailed cognitive exam is warranted.
“From a neurological standpoint, we were concerned with his confused rambling; sudden loss of concentration in the middle of a sentence; halting speech and absence of facial animation, resulting at times in a flat, open-mouthed expression,” Gupta wrote for CNN.
Gupta qualified that his suggestion was based on “only observations, not in any way diagnostic of something deeper”. He continued that “the president should be encouraged to undergo detailed cognitive and movement disorder testing, and those results should be made available to the public”.
One of the things Biden will have been hoping to get out of the ABC interview is stemming the flow of top Democratic donors from deserting him, write The Guardian’s Jonathan Yerushalmy and Callum Jones:
On Friday, media tycoon Barry Diller, when asked by the Ankler if he and his wife, the designer Diane von Fürstenberg, were holding firm with Biden’s campaign, he replied: “No.”
Diller, previously a key financial backer of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 campaign, has already donated more than $100,000 to Biden and the Democrats this time around.
Diller followed Abigail Disney – the heir to the Disney family fortune and a major party donor – who said on Thursday she would withhold donations unless Biden dropped out of the race.
And earlier in the week Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings joined calls for Biden to take himself out of the presidential race. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof, who has been a significant contributor to the party, proposed on Wednesday a “DEMbargo”, withholding funding until Biden stands aside.
Biden defiant as he fights for his political life
Good morning,
Joe Biden is still fighting for his political life. On Friday, the president was defiant in a make-or-break TV interview on ABC, insisting that only “the Lord almighty” could persuade him to exit the US presidential race.
At a rally in Wisconsin, also on Friday, Biden again insisted he wasn’t going anywhere, and dismissed concerns about his age. “We’ve also noticed a lot of discussion about my age,” said Biden. “Let me say something. I wasn’t too old to create over 50m new jobs.”
It remains unclear whether all this will be enough to assuage Democratic lawmakers, donors and voters who are calling on him to step down after a disastrous performance at the first presidential debate and a series of gaffes and news reports that have called into question his fitness to serve another term. The coming days, during which Biden has a packed schedule of rallies in swing states, will be crucial to his re-election bid.
Follow along here for the latest developments.
Here are key takeaways from the high-stakes ABC TV interview.
Pressed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on what he would do if friends and supporters expressed concern that his candidacy would cost Democrats the House of Representatives and Senate, Biden replied: “I’m not going to answer that question. It’s not going to happen.”
Millions are pinning their hopes on the Democratic party as the last wall of defence against Donald Trump’s threat of an “imperial presidency”, The Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief David Smith writes. Instead the Democratic party is offering 81-year-old Joe Biden and an internal civil war.
