Joe Biden’s ABC interview went better than the debate. That’s what’s so scary

Well, it finally happened. The promised post-debate interview with Joe Biden — intended to prove that the president cannot actually be summarily defeated by bedtime — ended up going just as badly as the debate itself.

There’s not a lot to feel good about here. Joe Biden — the man who put on a good show in 2019 on a packed-out stage of Democratic hopefuls to become the official presidential nominee — now struggles to answer questions coherently, even in a softball interview like the one tonight on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos. As Stephanopoulos repeatedly asked the president what happened on the debate stage when he floundered in front of Donald Trump, Biden replied, “I had a bad night,” or, “I just had a bad night,” and eventually, “I had a bad night. I don’t know why.”

Other explanations that have been put forward for Biden’s performance onstage have included a bad cold and jet lag. But most people didn’t find it entirely reassuring that either jet lag or a cold might’ve rendered the sitting president incoherent — not least someone running to stay in the White House for the next four years. After all, international diplomacy has been known to happen after 9pm.

Tonight, his responses were hoarse and halting. He repeated the criticisms he’s been making of Trump over the past few weeks — that Trump is a “pathological liar” — and started out stronger, stating confidently that his rival lied 28 times during the debate. But as the interview went on, he seemed to lose his train of thought somewhat, and called Trump a “congenital liar” instead. Twenty-eight times morphed into “27 or 28 times, whatever the number, over 20 times”. And though Biden may be correct when he says “the character of the president” is what matters, what he didn’t seem to realize is that the interview was clearly intended to be more about whether or not he’ll allow someone different to face off against Trump, rather than whether he’s more suited to the presidency than Trump is.

It became clear as time went on that Biden has been ensconced in an echo chamber since the debate — and one that is increasingly divorced from reality. As Stephanopoulos brought up tanking poll numbers, Biden asked him if polling is even that accurate these days, and then argued that it’s only two polls that show his approval rating against Trump going down. When Stephanpolous said, quite plainly, “Mr President, I’ve never seen a president with a 38 percent approval rating get elected,” Biden responded: “I don’t believe the polls.”

You don’t always have to believe the polls. Biden is correct when he says that they’ve become less and less reliable; anyone who thought Hillary Clinton was going to win and Brexit wasn’t going to happen (guilty) knows that. But when polls show a marked difference in opinion among your own voters before and after you’ve debated in public, it’s a different ball game.

“Are you being honest with yourself?” Stephanopoulos asked Biden at one point. He wanted to know if Biden might be overlooking his own frailty, his own blind spots, his own inability to unite a party that is slowly turning against him (news broke just before the interview went live that Senator Mark Warner was bringing together a group of other sitting senators to try and convince Biden to let someone else go to the top of the ticket.) He also wanted to know if the president might change his mind of his own volition, if enough members of his party were frank with him about how he didn’t seem up to another four years of the job.

“If the Lord almighty said, ‘Joe, get out the race,’ I’d get out the race, but the Lord almighty’s not coming down,” Biden said — not once, but twice.

And if he ended up losing the election because of these issues, Stephanopoulos pressed? Biden paused, then said that he could make his peace with that outcome because he would know inside that he’d done his best. That answer is, quite frankly, alarming.

Outside Biden’s supportive circle, Democratic donors — including an extremely wealthy Disney heiress — are pausing donations because they want Biden to drop out. The Democratic governor of Massachusetts said today that Biden should look to his legacy and “carefully evaluate” whether he should stay in the race. Down-ballot Democrats are said to be panicking that their own races will be affected if they come out in support of a president clearly in decline. And perhaps the most damning, even if the most subtle, development: The Trump campaign has started preemptively criticizing Kamala Harris, which points to a belief on their part that the vice president may take up the baton soon.

The party is in a difficult spot. Though Harris isn’t a hugely popular figure herself, she is the only one who can use the funds already donated toward her joint ticket with Biden. A memo circulated by one DNC member earlier this week suggested that the party could go through a full nominating process again, which it optimistically stated would be energizing for the country — but the reality is that a group of Democrats attacking each other in public might well be Donald Trump’s best case scenario. And indeed, Biden bowing out at all will seem to confirm everything Republicans have been saying to their base over the past four years about him being a compromised president, a secretly declined man, a “puppet for socialists”.

When Stephanopoulos once again pressed Biden on stepping down as the presidential nominee for 2024, Biden said, “I’m not gonna answer that. It’s not gonna happen.” But his tone was pleading and, even as he rattled off his achievements, he looked unsure.

Comparisons have already been made with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice who elected not to stand down, then died and left her seat vacant so that Trump could fill it with the ultra-conservative Amy Coney Barrett. While the liberal Justice known affectionately as RBG was a hero to many, it certainly complicated her legacy. Biden could end up with the same mark against his name.

But now the damage has been done — so publicly, so painfully — it’s hard to know whether it can be rectified even if he does stand aside.