by When President Biden appeared at a last-minute news conference Thursday night, he hoped to reassure the country of his mental acuity hours after a special counsel’s report devastatingly referred to him as a “well-intentioned old man with bad faith.” memory”. “
Instead, a visibly angry Biden made exactly the kind of verbal gaffe that has kept Democrats so nervous for months, mistakenly referring to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the “president of Mexico” while trying to address the latest developments in the war in Gaza.
The special counsel’s report and the president’s afternoon performance put Biden’s advanced age, the uniquely awkward issue hanging over his re-election bid, back at the center of America’s political conversation.
The 81-year-old president, already the oldest in the country’s history, has fought for years against the perception that he is a diminished figure. “My memory is fine,” he insisted Thursday from the White House.
Yet in a single cutting sentence, the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who had investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, captured the fears of Democrats who hold their breath when Biden appears in public and the Republican hopes. , especially former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. The Trump operation has made clear his intention to use Biden’s stiffer walk and sometimes confusing speech to portray him as weak.
Biden’s campaign has built its strategy around telling voters that the November election is a choice between the president, whatever doubts the public has about his age, and an opponent like Trump, 77, who they paint as a threat to democracy and personal relationships. freedoms.
Democrats have long rallied behind Biden. Without a serious alternative in the primary, many in the party believe the country’s future depends on the president’s ability to persuade voters that he is still fit to hold office for another four years.
But for all of Trump’s vulnerabilities (the Republican Party has been on a prolonged losing streak since he came to power), the more than $2 billion that Biden’s campaign and his allies hope to raise and spend will not do that the current president is younger. .
And Thursday night’s press conference was an example of the political dangers for Biden, whose missteps are magnified in part by the White House team’s tight control over his media exposure. His assistants are so risk-averse that they even passed a pre-Super Bowl interview this weekend before one of the country’s largest annual television audiences.
“Fairly or not, you can’t stop ringing the bell,” said David Axelrod, a former strategist for Barack Obama who has become one of the leading Democratic Party figures warning about how voters view Biden’s age. Axelrod said the special counsel’s report was very concerning to Democrats because it “goes to the core of what ails Biden politically now, which is a widespread fear that he’s not up to par.”
He added: “The most damaging things in politics are those that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions, and those are the things that travel very quickly. It’s a problem.”
Biden’s campaign declined to comment.
As a legal matter, Hur’s report cleared Biden of committing a criminal offense and announced that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. But Democrats seized on his charged language (Hur also invoked Biden’s “diminished faculties with advancing age” as something a jury would have been sympathetic to) to accuse the special counsel, once appointed by Trump, of motives. partisan. .
For Republicans aiming to unseat Biden, the report and the president’s angry response were a gift after several days in which his own dysfunction in Congress dominated the news. The Republican National Committee quickly created a graphic with the report’s eight most brutal words — “a well-intentioned old man with a bad memory” — grafted onto Biden’s campaign logo.
Never mind that the special counsel has declined to charge Biden, while Trump’s own more serious case over whether he mishandled classified documents remains part of the 91 felony charges he faces in four jurisdictions.
Still, Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s top strategists, called the special counsel’s description of Biden “damning and defining.”
“The report confirms what Americans have been witnessing through their television screens for the past few years: that an old man with a bad memory is leading the United States into a morass of wars, inflationary disasters and lack of opportunity for Americans who they pay taxes,” LaCivita said. saying.
Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat close to Biden, predicted he would receive more calls from “people expressing concern.” But he said he would respond by recounting his direct experiences with Biden, which, he said, showed the president was “sharp, committed and determined.”
Still, Biden’s confusion between Egypt and Mexico came shortly after a pair of slip-ups in the past week regarding departed European leaders. First, during a campaign swing in Nevada, he confused François Mitterrand, the former French president who died in 1996, with the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. Then, on Wednesday, he twice referred to having met in 2021 with Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor who died in 2017, instead of Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.
Coons downplayed “the calls I get from crazed Democrats saying, ‘Oh my God, the president said X!’ I think: ‘And the former president said Y!’ “If you asked Donald Trump who François Mitterrand was, he would look at you like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Trump has made his own series of verbal missteps: he recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and previously They confused the leaders of Hungary and Türkiye. – but polls show that voters don’t question his acumen the same way they do Biden’s. A NBC News poll released this week found that voters gave Trump a 16 percentage point lead on the question of who was more competent and effective, a 25-point swing from 2020, when Biden had a nine-point lead on that question.
Haley has argued that a new generation would better serve the country and both parties. “The first party to remove its 80-year-old candidate will win these elections!” she wrote in a fundraising email Thursday.
Biden’s aides privately emphasized that suggestions that his memory is failing would not hurt him because voters have already weighed his age when considering whether to support him against Trump. Some of the president’s allies on Thursday dusted off a playbook used by past presidents facing investigations: attacking investigators as motivated by partisan politics.
Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, said Hur did not have the experience to judge Biden’s memory.
“The people writing this report are lawyers, not doctors,” Mr. García said. “This person is a Republican who couldn’t find any evidence. He’s probably trying to hurt the president politically..”
For many Democrats, the episode was an unwelcome echo of the approach to the 2016 election. James B. Comey, the FBI director at the time, held a press conference that summer to declare that he would not charge Hillary Clinton for its use from a private email server, but still criticized his judgment and then, months later, reopened his investigation in the days before the election.
“This, for many of us, reminds us of the 11 days before Clinton-Trump,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist, who predicted that Biden’s problems would disappear because the election is still far away. “The blessing for Biden is that he was old before this report and he will be old after this report. We all knew that he is old.”
The special counsel’s report was surprisingly compelling. He described Biden’s memory as appearing to have “significant limitations,” characterized an interview he recorded in 2017 as “painfully slow” and said Biden did not remember some key dates from his vice presidency or “when his son Beau died.” “
In a letter to the special counsel, Biden’s lawyers called the numerous references to Biden’s memory “gratuitous,” as well as “prejudicial and inflammatory.” And Biden himself, with visible frustration, expressed his disbelief at the idea that he did not know when his son had died: “How the hell dare you bring that up?”
Rep. Daniel S. Goldman, a New York Democrat and former federal prosecutor, said the instant attention Biden’s Mexico-Egypt slip-up attracted was a “perfect example of how age issues are completely blown out of proportion.”
Biden will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee. He has won his party’s first nominating contests with ease, and deadlines to qualify for Democratic primaries have passed in about 80 percent of the states and territories.
Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is Biden’s only remaining Democratic challenger in the primary, has attracted little support so far. Phillips said the special counsel’s description of Biden’s memory showed that “the president is not fit to continue serving as our commander in chief beyond January 2025.”
James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, said negative perceptions about Biden’s age cannot be dismissed as a distraction.
“The public doesn’t see his age as… that’s not a Fox News issue,” he said in an interview after the news conference. “She is not a Taylor Swift manipulating the Super Bowl. So I don’t know how to get out of this.”
“The whole day,” he added, “was confirming an existing suspicion.”
Maggie Haberman contributed with reports.
