American voters woke up to post-debate reviews of the first Biden-Trump debate, with headlines reflecting Democrats’ fears that the incumbent president is too cognitively and physically weak to endure another five months of political campaigning or another term in office.
That concern, multiple media outlets reported, was reflected in pressure from Democratic donors and former Democratic officials, who are now openly discussing replacing Biden with an alternative presidential candidate at the party’s conference in Chicago in August.
“A clumsy performance and a panicked party,” wrote the New York Times on its front page. Columnist Nicholas Kristof, a centrist Democrat, said Biden was a “good man” who had ended his political career with a successful presidential term… “but I hope he evaluates his debate performance on Thursday night and withdraws from the race.”
Kristof named Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo as potential candidates “well positioned to defeat Trump in November.”
The Washington Post ran the headline, “Biden Stumbles as Trump Spreads Falsehoods,” noting that Biden had “struggled through a hoarse voice and an uneven delivery,” while former President Trump had responded to Biden’s “charged and deeply personal attacks” with “a blizzard of personal jibes and falsehoods.”
The Wall Street Journal said: “Democrats are privately discussing replacing Biden on the presidential ticket,” noting that Biden’s “stagnant performance has thrown the Democratic Party into disarray, with officials trying to gauge the president’s prospects after an appearance in which he stumbled over words, stammered through many answers and raised widespread concerns among voters that he is too old to serve.”
The Los Angeles Times was kinder. Under the headline “Biden’s Verbal Stumbling Blocks, Trump’s ‘Morality of an Alley Cat,'” the West Coast paper wrote that the November candidates “called each other criminals and liars and looked at each other with open contempt.” But, it said, “Biden’s early struggles with his words and the lack of timbre in his voice have instead caused panic among Democrats.”
The Guardian reported: ‘Defcon 1 moment’: Biden’s debate performance sends Democrats into panic,’ while the headlines internationally are little different. The left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz said: “Swinging Biden, pathological Trump: the worst possible presidential debate was a sad night for America”.
“Last night, Biden lost. Trump lost. American democracy lost. And while televised presidential debates rarely change the course of an election, for Democrats the spectacle on CNN was the sum of all their fears,” Haaretz reported.
The South China Morning Post weighed in on what the candidates’ positions meant for China, noting that Biden “focused” on Trump’s proposed tariff hikes, while Trump had accused his rival of being “afraid of doing business with China and increasing the risk of global conflict”.
The Australian said Democrats were in a downward spiral and were “furious” about Biden’s “poor performance” as “focus quickly turned to whether a new nominee for the party should be selected at the August convention”.
El Pais said the evening “Biden’s setback brought CNN and Fox News together,” adding that “the president’s poor performance is giving way to Democratic voices calling for an urgent replacement before the election.”
And in France, Le Monde described “Joe Biden’s sinking during the televised debate against Donald Trump” – a debate that “had become a disaster for the Democratic president, who on several occasions appeared overwhelmed, stumbling over words and unable to follow ‘. his thinking”.
And the BBC headlined: “Biden’s incoherent debate performance heightens fears about his age.” Correspondent Anthony Zurcher wrote that American voters’ concerns about Biden’s age and fitness for office had been irked ahead of the debate. “To say that this debate has not allayed those concerns may be one of the biggest understatements of the year,” Zurcher wrote.
But CNN, which hosted the debate and faced intense political pressure over fears that its moderators would become politically biased in its treatment of the candidates, was perhaps the most vocal.
“Biden’s disastrous debate throws his re-election bid into crisis,” the report said, noting that if Biden loses his bid for re-election in November, “history will show that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency.”
“It was clear that a political disaster was about to unfold as soon as the 81-year-old commander-in-chief shuffled stiffly onto the stage in Atlanta to stand eight feet from ex-President Donald Trump during what may be the most fateful presidential debate could become history,” cable news said. In a quick poll of viewers, 67% said the former president was the winner.
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