President Biden will speak at a closely watched news conference Thursday as he faces mounting pressuring over the future of his candidacy. The news conference, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in Washington after a day of meetings with NATO leaders, comes as the president faced a fresh wave of calls for him to end his re-election bid.
Mr. Biden rarely gives news conferences — this will be his first alone on stage since November — and follows the disastrous debate performance against former President Donald J. Trump three weeks ago that left his supporters deeply shaken. Mr. Biden’s appearance will mix some of his greatest strengths as president — his diplomacy and foreign policy efforts — with an unscripted setting that could reassure or further unnerve Democrats on his most critical weaknesses — perceptions of his age, health and vigor.
Here’s what to know:
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President’s resistance: Mr. Biden has said that he is set on staying in the race and that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to drop out. Elected Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, have politely but firmly asserted that the matter is not closed and that Mr. Biden should again consider whether he is up for a vigorous campaign.
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Democratic split: Other Democratic lawmakers have been more explicit in their efforts to push Mr. Biden aside. Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday became the first Senate Democrat to call for Mr. Biden to withdraw from the race, while a small but growing number of House Democrats have explicitly called for him to do so. On Thursday, Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan joined them.
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Orban to meet Trump: Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump, is expected to meet with the former president later Thursday. Mr. Orban, who is in the United States for the NATO summit, has traveled for a series of meetings this month, including one with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
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Money stakes: Mr. Biden is also facing increased financial pressure on his re-election campaign. Several top fund-raisers and megadonors for the Democratic Party, including the actor George Clooney, called on Wednesday for the president to step aside and make way for a new candidate.
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Trump on the trail: Mr. Trump, who largely retreated from public view as Democrats openly agonized over Mr. Biden’s debate performance, held a rally on Tuesday night that was at times boastful about the state of the race and mercilessly cruel to his political opponents. Mr. Trump, who is expected to make his running mate announcement soon, denigrated Mr. Biden’s looks; called Chris Christie, a Republican presidential rival, “a fat pig”; and suggested that Nancy Pelosi might be deteriorating faster than Mr. Biden.
July 11, 2024, 11:40 a.m. ET
As a growing number of Democrats call on President Biden to step aside, a group of Black faith leaders is holding a news conference at the Georgia State Capitol in support of the president. Several influential leaders of Black churches in Atlanta are attending.
July 11, 2024, 11:35 a.m. ET
Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, said that dismissing Biden’s debate performance as one bad night “reflects a continuing pattern of denial and self-delusion.” A few days earlier, Torres had urged Democrats to hold their criticism for fear of weakening Biden if he remained the nominee. But in a social media post on Thursday, Torres came close to calling for the president to drop his re-election bid.
“If the president formally becomes the Democratic nominee, we will have no choice but to make the best of a complicated situation,” he wrote. “But there is no point in denying the complications.”
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July 11, 2024, 11:30 a.m. ET
The conservative entrepreneur and fund-raiser David Sacks is scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention next week, according to a person with knowledge of the schedule. Sacks hosts an influential podcast called “All-In” that featured an interview with Trump a few weeks ago, and he is a close associate of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who famously gave a speech at the R.N.C. in 2016.
July 11, 2024, 11:26 a.m. ET
Mary Trump, Donald J. Trump’s estranged niece and a Biden campaign surrogate, shrugged off George Clooney’s expression of no-confidence in Biden’s candidacy. “It should be much bigger news that Donald has lost the support of virtually every single person who served with him when he was in the Oval Office,” she wrote in a blog post. She drew attention to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump and was a target of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.
July 11, 2024, 11:14 a.m. ET
Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, in a fund-raising appeal for President Biden, offered another irreverent rebuttal to fellow Democrats calling for Biden to end his re-election campaign. “There is only ONE person in this country who has ever kicked Trump’s a** in an election, and that is President Biden,” he wrote, adding: “I refuse to join the vultures on Joe’s shoulder following the debate.”
July 11, 2024, 11:10 a.m. ET
Another House Democrat, Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan, has called on Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee. “We just have too much at stake in this election to sit on the sidelines and be silent while we still have time to do something,” she told the Detroit News.
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July 11, 2024, 10:50 a.m. ET
The Trump campaign continued to make hay out of George Clooney’s no-confidence message about President Biden’s re-election bid. It posted a video that mashes together a scene from Clooney’s movie “Up in the Air,” where he plays a corporate down-sizer who is firing someone, with a clip of Biden’s ABC News interview in which he says he “just had a bad night” during the debate.
President Biden will hold his first solo news conference in eight months on Thursday when he faces reporters at the conclusion of a NATO summit in Washington, a critical test after his halting debate performance that seeded doubts about his re-election campaign.
The unscripted exchange with the news media comes as a growing number of Democrats on Capitol Hill and top donors have sounded alarms about Mr. Biden’s age and acuity, with some calling on him to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee.
Here’s what to know about the news conference:
It is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
The president will take questions at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, site of this week’s NATO summit. The news conference will wrap up a packed day for Mr. Biden, whose scheduled also includes two NATO working sessions and a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The New York Times will stream the news conference, alongside real-time commentary and analysis from reporters. The Associated Press will also offer a livestream at apnews.com.
Most cable news outlets will likely carry the news conference, given the intense scrutiny that Mr. Biden is facing to prove that he can handle unscripted moments.
July 11, 2024, 10:06 a.m. ET
A day after Senator Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democrat in the Senate to call on President Biden to end his re-election run, Vermont’s representative in the House, Becca Balint, issued a statement saying that she shares the “same concerns of so many Vermonters on the question of whether the president is the best candidate to defeat Trump.” Balint, a Democrat, did not call for Biden to leave the race but said: “We need honest, serious conversation about the best path forward.”
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July 11, 2024, 10:02 a.m. ET
In a sign of how Republicans are trying to leverage the questions around Biden’s mental acuity, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is holding a news conference in front of Brown’s office, saying the senator had helped hide Biden’s state. “He should fess up to the conspiracy, to the cover-up, and then take a position on whether he’s going to continue to ride with Biden,” Moreno said.
July 11, 2024, 9:57 a.m. ET
The White House pushed back President Biden’s news conference today by an hour — it is now scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Eastern. The appearance will cap a packed day for the president, who will be under intense scrutiny over how he handles an unscripted exchange with the news media.
July 11, 2024, 10:03 a.m. ET
A national security official said it was delayed because of the president’s full schedule at NATO.
July 11, 2024, 9:48 a.m. ET
Jacob Helberg, a young conservative activist who has quickly gained a following in Silicon Valley and Washington, tells me that he yesterday made another $1 million donation to back Trump — this one to the super PAC MAGA Inc. Helberg, an avowed anti-China hawk, tells me that Trump “will be the most pro-technology president in American history.” Helberg was recently named the co-chair of a young professionals for Trump group that is hosting an event at the Republican convention.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary will meet with former President Donald J. Trump in Florida on Thursday after the NATO summit in Washington, according to a Trump campaign official and a person close to the former president who was briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Orban, and the meeting comes after a series of others by the Hungarian leader this month, including one with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that caught many by surprise.
Hungary took over the European Union’s rotating presidency at the start of July with the promise to “make Europe great again” — echoing the “Make America Great Again” slogan of Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Orban has endorsed for the U.S. presidency.
Mr. Trump, who has a history of praising authoritarian leaders, often cites Mr. Orban’s support on the campaign trail. The two men met in March at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, where Mr. Trump lauded Mr. Orban as a “boss” because he did not brook political dissent. Both men are aligned in their anti-immigration views and their skepticism of NATO.
Although the E.U. presidency is largely a clerical position, Mr. Orban has engaged in a flurry of meetings with world leaders since taking over the position.
On July 2, he made an unexpected visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The move followed in the footsteps of other European leaders, but was one that Mr. Orban, an outlier in the European Union for his support of Russia and other issues, was known to have been avoiding.
Then on July 5, Mr. Orban traveled to Russia, meeting with Mr. Putin at the Kremlin for more than two hours. It was a rare trip to Russia by a European Union leader and one that caused alarm in capitals around the bloc. Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for Mr. Orban, said the leader’s trip to Moscow was “part of his peace mission.” There were no signs that the talks had done anything to sway Mr. Putin, however, with Mr. Orban telling reporters after that the positions of Kyiv and Moscow were “very far apart.”
Mr. Orban, a source of frustration for many European leaders, is known for embracing far-right politics and authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin. He has also made unclear calls for a cease-fire in Ukraine and direct negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, but has not publicly declared a concrete plan for a settlement.
Mr. Trump has also boasted of his closeness with Mr. Putin, frequently insisting in a hypothetical that his “very good relationship” with Russia’s leader would have kept him from invading Ukraine.
On Monday, Mr. Orban made yet another unexpected visit, this time to Beijing for previously unannounced talks with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. China’s official summary of their meeting said they exchanged their ideas on ending the war in Ukraine.
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July 11, 2024, 7:44 a.m. ET
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that 67 percent of Americans believe President Biden should end his re-election campaign — including 56 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents. But the race between him and former President Donald J. Trump for the popular vote is tied, according to the poll.
Senator Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday became the first Democratic senator to publicly call on President Biden to withdraw as the party’s presidential candidate in the aftermath of his disastrous debate performance last month.
“We can’t unsee what we saw,” Mr. Welch said in an interview shortly after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he called for Mr. Biden to end his campaign and allow another Democrat to take on former President Donald J. Trump. He said the president’s stumbles during the debate had only reinforced — rather than allayed — concerns about his ability to run a successful campaign.
“Age was a big issue going into the debate, and it was an opportunity, obviously, that the White House saw to put that to rest, and coming out of the debate, it intensified it,” the first-term senator said. “And that’s a real problem.”
Mr. Welch, 77, said his decision to call on the president to step aside was extremely difficult because he and voters in his home state “love Joe Biden.” He touted the 2020 election results, in which Vermonters delivered Mr. Biden the highest percentage victory of any state in the country.
But he said those same voters had deep anxieties about the future, fearing that four years under a second Trump administration would remove any chance of extending progressive policies championed by Mr. Biden and could wipe away the progress they have supported over the last four years.
Mr. Welch said it had become an existential issue for him to consider the threat of another Trump presidency, and that his determination was that Mr. Biden was not up to beating the former president.
“It’s not the elites in Vermont who are talking to me,” Mr. Welch said, brushing back an argument that Mr. Biden has made in recent days as he has defiantly refused to leave the race. “It’s the working-class mother who’s got two kids and is hoping maybe we can get the child care tax back. It’s kids who are working in AmeriCorps just to do cleanup and environmental work who are terrified that all the achievements of the Biden administration on the environment are going to be erased if we get a Trump presidency.”
“It’s a catastrophe,” he added.
The senator said he is not blind to the risks that could come should Mr. Biden step down, but rejected comparisons to the meltdown Democrats faced in 1968, when chaos and violence at the party convention in Chicago contributed to then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loss in the general election that November.
“One of the achievements of Joe Biden is that he has unified the Democratic Party — everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin,” Mr. Welch said. “And what that means is that if we have to go through ‘Who’s our next candidate?,’ it’s going to be among people who are all committed to the Biden commitment to save democracy, the Biden commitment to the environment, the Biden commitment to women’s rights.”
On June 28, the day after the debate with Donald J. Trump that sent his campaign into turmoil, President Biden appeared at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan to raise money from the L.G.B.T.Q. wing of the Democratic Party.
Pete Buttigieg spoke. Elton John introduced Mr. Biden. And a co-chair of the event was Andrew Tobias, 77, who served as the treasurer for the Democratic National Committee from 1999 to 2017. Mr. Tobias remains a formidable party financier: He has raised nearly $2.5 million for the Biden-Harris re-election effort.
But he now says he hopes that Mr. Biden will end his campaign and help facilitate the selection of a new Democratic nominee in his place.
“I’m in the camp that believes our odds of winning are better with a mini-primary,” Mr. Tobias said, alluding to discussions among Democratic insiders about how best to choose a new standard-bearer if Mr. Biden were indeed to step aside.
In an interview, Mr. Tobias stressed repeatedly that Mr. Biden “and his team of 4,000 highly competent appointees” were “a thousand times — a million times — better than Trump and the team he would assemble.” He added that believes Mr. Biden has been one of our finest presidents in modern history and said that if he remains the Democratic nominee come November, he believes the party could “persuade enough voters to see that he and his team are the far, far better choice.”
“But we might have a stronger chance of winning if he passes the torch,” Mr. Tobias added. “And winning is all that matters. Either way, I’m all in.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up her attacks on former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday as she said in Dallas that Mr. Trump would round up his political enemies, deport peaceful protesters and terminate the Constitution in a second term.
“Consider: Donald Trump has openly vowed if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one, that he will weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies, round up peaceful protesters and throw them out of our country and even, and even and I quote, ‘terminate’ the United States Constitution,” Ms. Harris said.
Ms. Harris has been harshly critical of Mr. Trump in the past, but at campaign events in the last two days, as an increasing number of Democrats question whether President Biden has the ability to beat Mr. Trump in November and the acuity to serve another four years, she has been far more explicit about the dangers she sees in a Trump second term. Ms. Harris has emerged as a top replacement for Mr. Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket should he drop out of the race.
In Dallas, Ms. Harris tried to attach Mr. Trump to Project 2025, a policy and staffing blueprint assembled by dozens of conservative groups for the next Republican administration. Among the platform proposals include replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president.
Ms. Harris accused Mr. Trump of adopting the project, which would shrink the Department of Education and cut programs like Head Start, the federal program for preschool children from low-income families.
“Let us be clear, this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future,” Ms. Harris told roughly 20,000 people at an event for Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority of which Ms. Harris is a member.
In her warning about the Constitution, Ms. Harris was referring to a statement from Mr. Trump in 2022 about Twitter. The site blocked links to a New York Post article that described emails found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Mr. Trump wrote at the time on his social media network, Truth Social. He also included in the post the lie that the 2020 election was “false & fraudulent.”
In December, he told Fox News that he would not be a dictator “other than Day 1” of his second term.
Project 2025, which is led by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is not Mr. Trump’s official campaign platform, and the former president has recently sought to distance himself from it. But the plans were developed by some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers who are likely to be involved in a potential second term, and many of the policies in Project 2025 mirror Mr. Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47.
In a statement, Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, accused “Team Biden” of “fear-mongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people.”
With Mr. Biden mired in controversy after his disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, Mr. Trump has increasingly taken aim at Ms. Harris. Mr. Trump has dubbed her “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and intentionally mispronounces her name at campaign events. Ms. Harris’s recent sharp rebukes of Mr. Trump come to the relief of many Democrats who felt she was too cautious and scripted when she first came to the White House.
But while political momentum is building for Ms. Harris, she is also navigating a difficult balancing act in not spotlighting the messaging limitations of her boss.
On Wednesday in Dallas, the crowd gasped when Ms. Harris first mentioned Mr. Trump’s name about midway through her speech. She noted that he had appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who joined the majority in overturning Roe v. Wade.
Sonia Southerland, a 69-year-old member of the sorority, said she was struck by how Ms. Harris explained the stakes of the election, specifically his potential plans for a second term.
“We can take that message back to our communities,” Ms. Southerland said, “back to our families, back to our big and little girls, and help them to understand what is happening in this country at this moment.”
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