The call is coming from inside the house.
The newest voice calling on the 81-year-old president to step down isn’t another pundit, mega-donor, or disgruntled Obama aide, but an official inside the president’s re-election campaign, NBC News reports.
“He needs to drop out,” an un-named Biden campaign official told NBC News. “He will never recover from this.”
It’s unclear whether the source was referencing any actual ailment from which Biden couldn’t recover or the flood of media commentary on the president’s debate performance.
The question of whether panic over Biden’s age will ever subdue looms over the campaign, as calls mount for the president to drop out despite voters’ apparent apathy over what was spun as a sign of Biden’s declining mental fitness.
The president, who since the debate has given more than a dozen interviews and speeches in which he appeared much more coherent, remains unconvinced by naysayers, vowing to stay in the race and slamming critics.
“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” a second campaign figure, who also apparently refused to go on the record, told NBC.
Despite Biden’s resolve, many Democratic party insiders, pundits, and donors are set on a new candidate, but few have managed to coalesce around a single name.
As media outlets pose litmus test after litmus test, framing each new Biden appearance as a chance to squash anxieties, the news cycle never seems to end on Biden’s age, despite Trump’s own age-related gaffes. Biden himself, who delivered scantly-publicized but energizing opening remarks to NATO, will deliver a press conference late Thursday afternoon.