Vulnerable House Democrat calls on Biden to end campaign ‘for the good of the country’ – as it happened

Nancy Pelosi raised eyebrows this morning with an interview on MSNBC in which she said it was “up to” Joe Biden to decide if he will continue his campaign for president. It seemed to be a signal from the former House speaker and leading Democratic voice that things remain in flux, even though Biden has shown no interest in stepping aside following his troubling debate performance against Donald Trump last month. But a top political forecaster now believes the president’s standing has fallen further since their encounter, and Trump is now slightly favored to win several crucial swing states, while the ranks of those who believe Biden should drop out has grown. Pat Ryan, a vulnerable Democratic congressman, announced Biden should stand down “for the good the country”, and George Clooney, the actor and party fundraiser, made a similar argument.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Top Biden officials will meet with Senate Democrats on Thursday, while House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has reportedly said he will relay lawmakers’ concerns to the president.

• You will see Biden on TV again on Monday, when he sits for an interview with NBC News.

• Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former White House communications director, called for his campaign to make clear how they plan to move forward amid the deluge of bad news.

• Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, managed to convey both support and fear in cryptic remarks about Biden.

• Should Biden step aside, perhaps a “blitz primary” will follow.

Three officials close to Joe Biden will meet with Senate Democrats tomorrow, as the president seeks to reassure his congressional allies that he has what it takes to beat Donald Trump.

The Biden-Harris campaign confirmed that campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and top White House advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti will meet with senators at lunch.

So far, no Democrats from Congress’s upper chamber have called for Biden to abandon his re-election bid, although Colorado’s Michael Bennet went public with his belief that Biden cannot win, and will ensure the party loses the Senate and remains in the minority in the House:

Last week, Donald Trump declared that he had nothing to do with Project 2025. The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reports that there are plenty of indications to the contrary:

Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 after extreme comments from one of its leaders falls flat given the extensive Trump ties and similarities between the project’s policy ideas and the former president’s platform.

On Truth Social last week, Trump claimed to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it”. The disavowal from Trump came after Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said: “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”

Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation effort to align the conservative movement behind policies that an incoming rightwing president should undertake. The far-reaching plan, which would upend the way the federal government operates, includes a lengthy manifesto and recruitment of potential staffers for a second Trump administration.

Trump’s comments show that an alignment with the project could hurt him with key voters and that he doesn’t appreciate being seen as someone who could be controlled by an outside group.

But, in reality, Trump and Project 2025 share the same vision for where the US should go in a conservative presidency. His platform, dubbed Agenda 47, overlaps with Project 2025 on most major policy issues. Project 2025 often includes more details on how some key conservative goals could be carried out, offering the meat for Trumpian policy ideas often delivered as soundbites.

Joe Biden might be facing significant concerns from Democrats over his viability as a candidate, but his campaign is keeping on with their messaging intended to turn voters against Donald Trump.

Lately, they have been focused on Project 2025, the rightwing plan to remake the US ’s institutions, whose authors have ties to the former president. Here’s Biden in a TikTok video, encouraging people to look into the project:

Joe Biden has agreed to an interview with NBC News on Monday, the network announced.

The interview with take place in Austin, Texas, with anchor Lester Holt, and air in full that evening.

The president has been doing interviews more frequently since the debate against Donald Trump, including with a surprise call-in to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, in which he insisted he would not stand aside.

These encounters with the press have not always been helpful to his campaign. Last week, he sat down for a one-on-one interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, where some of his remarks raised eyebrows. Here’s more on that:

The Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has told lawmakers that he will let Joe Biden know about their concerns regarding his electability, Politico reports.

Eight Democrats, all in the House, have so far publicly called for the president to end his re-election bid, while other have been reported to have said so behind closed doors.

Jeffries has kept his public comments about Biden to a minimum, and is said to have mostly focused on listening to lawmakers’ concerns in private meetings.

Tennessee’s Democratic representative Steve Cohen responded to George Clooney’s calls for Joe Biden to withdraw his re-election bid, saying:

“George Clooney is a movie producer who needs to produce movies,” reports Fox correspondent Hillary Vaughn.

Cohen met alongside House Democrats on Tuesday at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC on Tuesday to discuss Biden’s future as the party’s nominee.

Following the meeting, Cohen was asked by reporters whether Democrats were on the same page, to which he responded: “No … Not even in the same book.”

Both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have been entangled in various scandals surrounding their acceptance of luxury gifts amid accusations of political partiality.

In 2023, ProPublica revealed that Thomas had accepted various luxury trips from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow which he previously did not disclose on official record.

Additionally, rightwing judicial activist Leonard Leo made secret payments to Thomas’s wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, over a decade ago and emphasized “No mention of Ginni” on the documents, according to a Washington Post investigation.

Thomas has denied wrongdoing amid calls of resignation and impeachment from Democrats.

Meanwhile, reports emerged last year of Alito failing to disclose a seat he accepted on the private plane owned by conservative billionaire Paul Singer for a luxury fishing trip.

The justice has also been embroiled in scandals revolving flags reportedly flown outside his homes which were also flown by January 6 insurrectionists in 2021.

Those flags included an upside-down US flag that was reportedly flown outside his home in 2021, as well as an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has become a symbol for Christian extremists.

Alexandrio Ocasio-Cortez’s introduction of articles of impeachment against justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito marks a significant move from Democrats but will unlikely move forward in the GOP-controlled House.

The impeachment articles, which were co-sponsored by handful of other Democratic representatives including Barbara Lee, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman, follow calls from Democratic senators to the justice department to investigate Thomas.

Thomas and Alito have been embroiled in controversy after revelations emerged of their acceptance of luxury gifts and travel amid accusations of lack of political neutrality in their work in the nation’s highest court.

The only supreme court justice to ever be impeached was Samuel Chase in 1805; however, Chase was acquitted by the Senate.

According to a broadly phrased line in the constitution that is largely up for interpretation, officials can be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

In the unlikely event that the GOP-controlled House votes to impeach the conservative justices, the Senate will proceed with a trial. The Senate will then require a two-thirds majority to convict the justices and remove them from office.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced articles of impeachment against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two conservative supreme court justices who have been embroiled in controversy over their acceptance of luxury gifts and travel.

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez wrote:

The unchecked corruption crisis on the supreme court has now spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements constitute a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.

Nancy Pelosi raised eyebrows this morning with an interview on MSNBC in which she said it was “up to” Joe Biden to decide if he will continue his campaign for president. It seemed to be a signal from the former House speaker and leading Democratic voice that things remain in flux, even though Biden has shown no interest in stepping aside following his troubling debate performance against Donald Trump last month. But a top political forecaster now believes the president’s standing has fallen further since their encounter, and Trump is now slightly favored to win several crucial swing states, while the ranks of those who believe Biden should drop out has grown. Pat Ryan, a vulnerable Democratic congressman, announced Biden should stand down “for the good the country”, and George Clooney, the actor and Democratic fundraiser, made a similar argument.

Here’s what else has happened so far today:

• Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former White House communications director, called for his campaign to make clear how they plan to move forward amid the deluge of bad news.

• Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, managed to convey both support and fear in cryptic remarks about Biden.

• Should Biden step aside, perhaps a “blitz primary” might follow.

Let us, for a moment, entertain the idea of Joe Biden bowing out of the race for president. What would happen then? As the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports, some Democrats believe the party should hold a “blitz primary” to reinvigorate voters, and rally support around a new candidate:

In the morass in which the Democratic party now finds itself over Joe Biden’s troubled presidential candidacy, a prominent narrative is that the party is confronted by two dire options: an aged and weakened Biden stumbles on to November, or he stands down, igniting an acrimonious and chaotic scramble for his replacement.

Either way, Donald Trump wins.

Over the past few days, however, energy has been building around a third, more optimistic solution. Advocates of this alternative model believe it could reinvigorate Democrats by putting the spotlight on young fresh talent, inspire the country with a powerful articulation of the party’s values and, critically, prevent Trump from returning to the White House bent on unleashing a full-blown attack on American democracy.

The idea is being floated by a loose affiliation of Democratic party stalwarts, including former senior government officials and elected representatives, major donors, and current party officeholders. They are calling their plan the “blitz primary”– a quick-fire, tightly controlled selection process that would culminate with a younger successor to Biden being nominated at next month’s Democratic national convention.

“The question is: how can we flip this disaster into something remarkable?” said Ted Dintersmith, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who is a leading proponent of the blitz primary idea. “What would totally shift the national narrative, turning bad options into an opportunity?”

With Pat Ryan’s statement, the number of Democratic members of Congress who have publicly called for Joe Biden to stand aside has risen to eight.

In his interview with the New York Times, Ryan hit back on Biden’s insistence earlier this week that it was only party “elites” who want him to end his bid for re-election.

Ryan said he made his decision after spending days in his exurban New York City district, where constituents were “deeply concerned” about Biden.

“These are the opposite of elites,” Ryan told the Times “These are people eating hot dogs and drinking beer and talking about my Yankees and where the country’s at and expressing some pretty deep and weighty things.”

Should Biden step aside, Ryan said it “would go down in history at or near what George Washington did in terms of stepping aside for the good of the country”, and “it would be such a stark contrast to the selfishness of Trump.”

Should that happen, he said Democrats should hold an open process to replace Biden, and that he thought Kamala Harris, governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Wes Moore of Maryland, or perhaps Pete Buttigieg or Gina Raimondo, both cabinet secretaries, would make good candidates.

Here’s more about the other lawmakers who have come out against Biden:

Democratic congressman Pat Ryan, whose district is one of the most closely contested in the country, told the New York Times that he does not think Joe Biden can beat Donald Trump, and that the president should step aside and make way for another nominee.

“I’d be doing a grave disservice if I said he was the best candidate to serve this fall,” he told the Times by phone.

“For the good of our country, for my two young kids, I’m asking Joe Biden to step aside in the upcoming election and deliver on the promise to be a bridge to a new generation of leaders.”

“I really hope, with all my heart, that he will listen,” he added.

Here’s more from Ryan:

A spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi has offered some clarification of her comments about Joe Biden on MSNBC this morning.

“Speaker Pelosi fully supports whatever President Biden decides to do. We must turn our attention to why this race is so important: Donald Trump would be a disaster for our country and our democracy,” said Ian Krager, the former House speaker’s spokesperson.

“Whatever President Biden decides to do” seems like the key part there, given that Biden insists he is doing nothing else but running for re-election.

While Democrats are having a bit of a crisis over the viability of Joe Biden’s campaign, Donald Trump made his return to the campaign trail yesterday, with a rally in Florida. As the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports, the former president delighted in Biden’s struggles, while also occasionally veering into bizarre takes on subjects such as bacon. Here’s more:

Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida on Tuesday night, hurling insults at Joe Biden and airing a litany of familiar grievances, but declining to name a running mate for November’s general election.

The former president and presumptive Republican nominee was speaking to a crowd of several hundred supporters at his golf club in Doral, a western suburb of Miami, keeping them waiting in 90F heat for a freewheeling monologue that began more than an hour later than scheduled.

There was speculation that he might use his first public appearance since last month’s debate with the president to announce Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was present, as his vice-presidential pick, six days ahead of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.

Instead, Trump delivered a rambling 75-minute speech that included a succession of attacks on Biden and his faltering debate performance, which has raised questions among Democrats about whether the 81-year-old president was robust enough for a second term of office.

He seized on the post-debate turbulence that has prompted calls from some senior Democrats for Biden to step down and for Kamala Harris to be nominated.

“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos, and having a full-scale breakdown all because they can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala,” he said, repeating previous derogatory terms for the pair.

Democratic lawmakers are clearly in a bind over what to do about Joe Biden in the wake of his stumbling debate performance against Donald Trump, and you can tell by the way that they are talking.

The below comments from Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, as captured by MSNBC at the Capitol, are emblematic of the rhetorical knots many Biden allies have been twisting themselves into all week, as they signal that they are worried about the president’s re-election prospects, without going so far as to call for him to drop out.

“I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November,” said Blumenthal, who adds that Trump winning would be an “existential threat to the country”.

“We have to reach a conclusion as soon as possible. And I think, Joe Biden, as the Democratic nominee, has my support.”

Make of that what you will. Here’s the video: