Biden mocks Trump at campaign stop on day after debate performance that left Democrats panicking: Live updates

Former president Barack Obama has spoken out after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on Thursday night.

The 44th president famously had a bad first debate during his 2012 reelection campaign and was bested by then-Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who came across as strong and forceful compared to the lackluster incumbent. Nevertheless, Obama went on to win the White House for a second term.

The former president wrote on X: “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon must report to prison by Monday, July 1 after the Supreme Court rejected his last-minute appeal to avoid his four-month sentence for defying subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the events of January 6.

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“Sleepy” Joe Biden just gave the Democratic Party a wake-up call. The concerns about the incumbent president’s age and mental fitness are not going away.

So what can his party do about it, if anything?

John Bowden reports.

Should Joe go? Even those who love him most have had to admit that his performance in the presidential debate with Donald Trump was concerning, to say the least. Some senior Democrat figures are reportedly of the opinion that it was a disaster.

After many years in which presidential debates have often been stale, enlivened occasionally by that rarest of TV moments, a “zinger”, the 90 minutes that President Biden spent arguing with President Trump turned out to be the most consequential such encounter since 1960, when the tanned, photogenic Jack Kennedy finished off sickly-looking Richard Nixon.

Neither of the 2024 candidates came close to replicating the high-minded and serious exchanges between the future presidents Kennedy and Nixon, but Mr Biden and Mr Trump’s often puerile, superficial and (especially on Mr Trump’s part) fictional contributions must make many Americans wonder afresh what they’ve done to deserve this choice. The low point was a hissy dispute about who is the better golfer.

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Hours after struggling to keep up with Donald Trump’s avalanche of lies and failing to string together coherent sentences in his 90-minute debate with the former president,Joe Biden’s fired-up remarks to a rally crowd in North Carolina were night and day from last night’s disaster.

Andrew Feinberg and Alex Woodward report for The Independent.

An extremely rare sight occurred in the early hours of this morning after the first 2024 presidental debate when news outlets – no matter what their political bent – all agreed, as one, that the match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump had been “disastrous.”

Left-leaning news outlets CNN and Bloomberg, as well as the right-leaning Fox News and The Washington Examiner, all used precisely that word to describe the outcome of the first head-to-head of this plighted election year.

Ariana Baio has more.

Katie Rogers of The New York Times reports that people familiar with Jill Biden’s thoughts on the president’s performance in the debate say she knows it was bad but that she is nowhere near the conclusion some Democrats suggest she should be — that of encouraging him to step aside.

“Today’s appearance makes that very obvious,” says Rogers.