President Biden has reportedly told an ally he knows he’ll have to bow out of the 2024 race for the White House if he can’t turn things around in the coming days following last week’s train wreck debate against Donald Trump.
The 81-year-old president has apparently pinned his re-election’s future on an ABC News interview and campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over the holiday weekend, the New York Times reported, citing an unnamed source.
“He knows if he has two more events like [the debate], we’re in a different place,” the ally told the outlet.
The report marks the first evidence that Biden is considering giving up on his bid for a second term after he and his team repeatedly rejected the possibility following the June 27 debate.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates attacked the Times report Wednesday as “absolutely false.”
“If the New York Times had provided us with more than 7 minutes to comment we would have told them so,” Bates tweeted shortly after the story was published.
However, one of Biden’s top advisers — who wasn’t named — admitted the incumbent was “well aware of the political challenge he faces.”
Polls since the debate have shown the electorate moving toward Trump, 78, after Biden spent 90 minutes stumbling over his words and losing his train of thought during the first of two scheduled debates.
The White House initially blamed Biden’s poor performance on a cold, while the president himself told donors Tuesday night he had almost fallen asleep on stage due to the rigors of two foreign trips earlier in June.
However, the disclosure has only raised new questions about Biden’s fitness for office, since he spent a full week prepping for the debate with advisers at Camp David.
Meanwhile, sources told The Post Monday night that antsy Democratic donors have given Biden a two-week grace period for his poll numbers to recover.
A source privy to a call with top campaign contributors had said that any decline in polling numbers after that period would lead to a new push to remove Biden from the ticket, likely to be replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Additional reporting by Steven Nelson and Lydia Moynihan