Desperate Biden hits back at NY Times after it told him to drop out of race – as Democratic donors float 'intervention' led by Obama to get president to see sense after debate

A desperate Joe Biden has hit back at the New York Times after it told him to drop out of the presidential race following his disastrous debate.

The Times previously jointly endorsed two Democratic presidential candidates Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in 2020 instead of Biden.

But despite being snubbed by the prestigious broadsheet, Biden would go on to win his party’s nomination and defeat Trump in November 2020.

A senior adviser to the president told CNN: ‘The last time Joe Biden lost the New York Times editorial board’s endorsement, it turned out pretty well for him.’

On Friday the editorial board of the Times wrote Biden ‘is not the man he was four years ago’ and criticized his rationale for running, saying it was a ‘reckless gamble’.

Meanwhile the fallout from the debate has left Democratic donors floating the idea of an ‘intervention’ led by Obama to get the sitting president to see sense after he was widely mocked for his performance against Trump.

There have been discussions with political advisers about arcane rules under which Biden could be removed from the ticket against his will and replaced at or before the Democratic National Convention in August, according to a person familiar with the effort. 

But former US president Barack Obama defended Biden in a Twitter post on Friday. 

‘Bad debate nights happen,’ he wrote. ‘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.’

With only 131 days before the November election, there are a number of practical complications with removing Biden.

Even if he quit, his vice-president Kamala Harris is so unpopular that it is thought by analysts she would not be able to face a forceful campaign against a vigorous Trump.

In an article on Friday titled ‘To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race’, the New York Times blasted his continued attempts to run as a ‘reckless gamble’ with the country’s future. 

They said that the country needed ‘a stronger opponent’ to stand in the way of the ‘significant jeopardy to… democracy’ – a threat characterised by the Republican leader.

In a damning blow, the newspaper’s editorial board said: ‘There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.’

They continued: ‘The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November. 

‘It is the best chance to protect the soul of the nation — the cause that drew Mr. Biden to run for the presidency in 2019 — from the malign warping of Mr. Trump. And it is the best service that Mr. Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.’

The brutal indictment comes despite a defiant Biden insisting last night that he could still win the election – as he refused to pull the plug on his bid for a second term.

Altought the New York Times has become the first US newspaper to call on Biden to drop out of the race, other influential publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Atlantic have published articles by their leading columnists calling on Biden to step aside. 

Meanwhile a Silicon Valley group of megadonors, including Ron Conway and Laurene Powell Jobs, were calling, texting and emailing one another about a situation they described as a possible catastrophe, according to CNN.

The donors wondered about whom in the Biden fold they could contact to reach Jill Biden, the first lady, who is thought to be able to persuade her husband not to run.

One Silicon Valley donor who had planned to host an intimate fund-raiser featuring  Biden this summer has reportedly decided not to go through with the gathering because of the debate calamity.

Another major California donor left a debate watch party early and emailed a friend with the subject line: ‘Utter disaster’. 

However no high-quality scientific polls have been conducted since the debate, so political experts remain uncertain of the wider damage to the Biden campaign. 

The crisis in the donor class could not come at a worse moment for Biden as his opponent Trump has outraised him in each of the last two months, erasing the president’s once gaping financial advantage and opening one of his own. 

The donor worries come after Biden meandered through the 90-minute CNN spectacle, struggling to finish sentences and losing his train of thought multiple times in front of tens of millions of stunned TV viewers. 

CNN, the broadcaster who hosted the debate, said it was viewed by 48 million people on television and millions more online. 

One veteran Democratic strategist told the Financial Times: ‘Anyone other than a known entity would be a suicide mission’. And that the notion of replacing Biden at this point not merely folly but ‘folly squared’. 

In a bid to fight back, the president used a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, to assuage the widespread concerns as some of his closest allies on Friday. 

‘I know I’m not a young man. To state the obvious,’ Biden said, standing alongside First Lady Jill while she wore a Christian Siriano dress covered in the word ‘vote.’

‘Folks, I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to.’

‘But I know what I know – I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done,’ the president argued.

‘I give you my word as a Biden. I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul that I could do this job,’ he added.

But Democrat grandees are calling for the President to suspend his campaign and step aside for a younger candidate at this year’s party convention, which will take place in August.

‘I think the president has one week to prove he is not dead,’ Matthew Yglesias, a US political blogger, was told by one congressman.

Mark Buell, a Democrat donor, said: ‘Do we have time to put somebody else in there?’

Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod added: ‘There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.’

And David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s campaign when he came to power in 2008, told CNN: ‘It’s kind of a Defcon 1 moment… they are three years apart, but they seemed about 30 years apart tonight.’

This frank concern was concurred in the UK – where Conservative Cabinet ministers desperately sought to preserve Britain’s ‘special relationship’.

Three told The Telegraph that Biden needed to be swapped out for someone younger.

They bluntly said the Democrats have to ‘get rid’ of the aging politician and ‘switch him fast’ if they want to hold on to victory.

A devastating DailyMail.com snap poll of the debate found that a clear majority of independent voters believe Biden should no longer be the nominee.

Some 62 percent said he should be dumped from the ticket.

J.L. Partners polled 805 independent voters immediately after the 90-minute clash, and found that 68 percent said the former president won out over his White House successor.

The president used the 20-minute speech in North Carolina to clean up many of the arguments he attempted to make on the debate stage against his Republican opponent.

‘I don’t know what you did last night but I spent 90 minutes on a stage debating a guy who has the morals of an alley cat,’ Biden said.

‘Did you see Trump last night? I guess he set a new record – I mean this sincerely – for the number of lies told in a single debate,’ the president continued.

‘He lied about the kind of economy he created. He lied about the pandemic he botched – killing millions of people,’ Biden went on.

The president pushed that Trump lied in his denial about calling military members ‘suckers and losers,’ a claim made by the Republican’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly.

‘He tried to deny it. But are you going to believe a four star Marine general?’ Biden asked. ‘Or a disgraced, defeated lying Donald Trump?’

Biden also dismissed Trump’s claims that crime has risen under the Democrat’s watch.

‘And then I pointed out, that the only convicted criminal onstage last night was Donald Trump,’ the president said – making his performance seem much smoother than it actually was.

‘Well, I thought about his 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on a woman in a public place, his being fined $400 million for business fraud,’ Biden continued. ‘I thought to myself Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon – Donald Trump is a one-man crime wave.’

That prompted a ‘Lock Him Up!’ chant from the crowd.

Trump historically led his supporters in ‘Lock Her Up!’ cheers against his 2016 opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Biden, at first, appeared to express some discomfort with those words – but also smiled.

The Democratic president said Trump’s ‘biggest lie’ was taken no responsibility for January 6.

‘We all saw it with our own eyes,’ Biden said.

The president also pushed that he hoped this was the start of his post-debate redemption arc.

‘I know what millions of Americans know – when you get knocked down you get back up,’ Biden said to cheers.

First lady Jill Biden spoke first and defended her husband’s debate performance.

‘What you saw last night on the debate stage was Joe Biden – a president with integrity and character who told the truth. And Donald Trump told lie after lie after lie,’ Dr. Biden said.

She marveled when the audience joined in and called Trump a liar.

Dr. Biden applauded her husband for spending the last few years helping ‘heal the country.’

He ‘helped us heal from the chaos of the last administration.’

‘We can’t choose our chapter of history, but we can choose who leads us through it,’ she said. ‘There is no one I would rather have sitting in the Oval Office right now than my husband.’

Meanwhile Donald Trump twisted the knife into Biden last night – calling his disastrous debate performance a ‘big victory’ and suggesting the U.S. can’t survive four more years of his presidency if he can’t make it through 90 minutes on stage.

The 77-year-old took the rally stage in Virginia after the state’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, who was once tipped to be a challenger for the GOP presidential nomination.

Trump tore into Biden for his poor performance after a week of rest and then went spoke about migrants, global warming electric cars, Al Capone, Hannibal Lecter, whales, Michelle Obama.

The audience of MAGA faithful then cheered for their favorite nicknames for Biden, including ‘sleepy’ and ‘crooked’.

‘Did anyone last night watch a thing called the debate? Man, that was a big one,’ he told a fired-up crowd in the crucial swing state.

‘Biden spent the entire week at Camp David resting, working, studying—he studied so hard he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.’

‘He got the debate rules he wanted, he got the date he wanted, at the network he wanted with the [moderators] he wanted.

‘No amount of rest or rigging could defend his atrocious record’.

Trump added that the question is not if Biden can survive a 90-minute debate, but whether the country can survive another four years of him in the White House.

The presumptive Republican nominee then reeled off his greatest rally hits, and pointed out ‘beautiful women’ from North Carolina who had been to more than 170 of his rallies.

He compared the former Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam to Michael Jackson because he was involved in a blackface scandal.

Trump also discussed potential Biden replacements, and hinted that Michelle Obama would be a good choice if she wasn’t polling so badly.

‘A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for failure, surrender, and disaster for our country. A vote for your all-time favorite president, Donald J. Trump, is a vote for stopping Joe Biden’s inflation and border invasion and for making America great again!’

It is thought the decision if Biden hangs up his gloves will come down to his wife’s advice. She is regarded as her husband’s ultimate confidante and perhaps the only person capable of persuading him to throw in the towel.

Biden also takes counsel from his sister, Valerie, and at times, his wayward son, Hunter, who was recently convicted of three criminal charges.

But Chris Whipple, who chronicled the clan in his book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, told the Financial Times: ‘Presidents, because of who they are and the way they’re made, don’t walk away from power voluntarily.’

The last time a president stepped aside was in 1974 when Richard Nixon was mired in the Watergate scandal.