Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, one of the first journalists to call on President Biden to withdraw from the Democratic presidential ticket, said it’d be “strange” if his team didn’t weigh in on the issue.
“That’s our role. To try to advocate for the public,” Kristof said on “CUOMO.”
The New York Times editorial board renewed its call for Biden to step down, writing in a scathing editorial that the president was “embarrassing himself.”
The editorial, published Monday, said Biden remaining in the race would make it more likely that former President Trump would retake the White House, and that Democrats “who want to defeat Mr. Trump in November” should “speak plainly to the president.”
“They need to tell him that his defiance threatens to hand victory to Mr. Trump,” the board wrote. “They need to tell him that he is embarrassing himself and endangering his legacy. He needs to hear, plain and clear, that he is no longer an effective spokesman for his own priorities.”
The editorial came as Biden forcefully pushed back at critics and insisted he isn’t leaving the ticket. Biden argues he’s the best Democrat to defeat Trump and has already amassed the delegates necessary during this year’s primaries to be his party’s standard-bearer.
The Times argued Biden has failed to restore confidence in his ability to campaign and defeat Trump. Biden held an interview Friday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and Monday issued a letter to Democratic lawmakers and also called into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to argue forcefully for his candidacy.
“For voters who held out hope that President Biden’s failure to communicate during last month’s debate was an aberration, the intervening days have offered little comfort,” the board wrote in its piece.
“Donald Trump’s candidacy for a second term poses a grave threat to American democracy. Mr. Biden, instead of campaigning vigorously to disprove doubts and demonstrate that he can beat Mr. Trump, has maintained a scripted and controlled schedule of public appearances,” the board wrote.
“He has largely avoided taking questions from voters or journalists — the kinds of interactions that reveal his limitations and caused him so much trouble on the debate stage. And when he has cast aside his teleprompter, most notably during a 22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday, he has continued to appear as a man in decline.”
The Times’s editorial board also reiterated its earlier call for the president to step out of the race Tuesday, writing that Biden “does not seem to understand that he is now the problem — and that the best hope for Democrats to retain the White House is for him to step aside.”
