White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to tamp down concerns over President Biden’s shocking debate performance in late June declaring that the President planned to “turn the page” on the disastrous debate and get out on the campaign trail so Americans could “see him for themselves.”
In the July 2 White House press briefing, Jean-Pierre claimed that Biden’s debate performance was hampered by a cold and dismissed concerns over alarming behavior by arguing that incumbent presidents frequently “have a bad night in their first debate.”
That evening, President Biden told a group of donors in Virginia that it was jet lag from all of his international travel in the weeks before the debate that caused him to falter.
However, Biden had eleven days to recover from traveling before he faced off against Donald Trump in Atlanta and spent a full week at Camp David with nothing on his public schedule to rest up and prepare for the June 27 debate.
During the July 3 press briefing, Associated Press reporter Seung Min Kim pressed Jean-Pierre about the president’s jet lag excuse, prompting the press secretary to snap that it wasn’t an “excuse” but an “explanation.”
Jean-Pierre insisted that the president was exhausted from international travel and he also had a cold.
While most elected Democrats continued to stand by Biden, one Democrat House member, Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, broke from the rest of the party and openly called for the president to follow Lyndon Johnson’s example and withdraw from the race.
That same day, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested in an interview that it was legitimate to ask if the president’s debate performance was just “an episode” or if it was a “condition.”
When asked about Pelosi’s comments in the July 2 press briefing, Jean-Pierre said the president’s performance at the debate was just a “bad night” due to a cold.
