Biden’s family discusses firing campaign advisers over horrific debate performance against Trump: Live

For balance, here’s Alex Woodward on Trump’s “victory lap” in Virginia following the debate.

The former president used his latest rally to argue that the upcoming election isn’t about whether the clearly-struggling Biden can “survive a 90-minute debate” but whether America can survive another four years under his leadership, suggesting that the country might not “survive another five months.”

Hours after the first presidential debate, where he struggled to keep up with Trump’s avalanche of lies and couldn’t string together coherent sentences,a visibly energized Joe Biden acknowledged the previous night’s failures in fired-up remarks to a raucous rally crowd in North Carolina on Friday.

“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said at the end of his remarks in Raleigh.

“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as well as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to to this job.

“I know what millions of Americans do: When you get knocked down you get back up.”

Andrew Feinberg and Alex Woodward have this report.

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi went on the attack on Sunday, coming to the defense of Joe Biden following his disastrous debate performance last week.

Pelosi, responding to calls from some Democrats and newspaper editorial boards for Biden to step aside and polling showing that a clear majority of Americans believe that he does not have the mental faculties to be president, pivoted to attacking the Republican candidate instead.

“There are healthcare professionals who think that Trump has dementia,” she told CNN.

“If we’re just talking about mental acuity, let’s be fair about it. Not even that he lies, that he doesn’t know the truth.”

Here’s what Trump thought of her remarks, by the way.

The president’s family has blamed his campaign team for his disastrous debate performance on Thursday, questioning whether top advisers should be fired while insisting he should remain in the White House race.

One of the president’s most influential allies in the House of Representatives, Jamie Raskin, became the first elected Democrat to admit to a news program on the record this weekend that his party is having “serious conversations” about whether Joe Biden should continue as the Democrats’ presidential nominee.

Raskin appeared for an interview with Ali Velshi on MSNBC and explained that the party would be unified in the fall — whether it was behind Biden, or another nominee he indicated the party could possibly choose before then.

“Obviously, there was a big problem with Joe Biden’s debate performance,” Raskins said.

“And there’s also just a tremendous reservoir of affection and love for Joe Biden in our party. So this makes it a difficult situation for everybody, but there are very honest and serious, rigorous, conversations taking place at every level of our party.

“One thing I can tell you is that regardless of what President Biden decides, our party is going to be unified… And so whether he’s the candidate or someone else is the candidate, he is going to be the keynote speaker at our convention, he will be the figure that we rally around to move forward and beat the forces of authoritarianism and reaction in the country.”

Joe Biden met with his family at Camp David in Maryland on Sunday to discuss his political future after Thursday’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, which only heightened doubts about his cognitive ability and sparked calls for him to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.

The president’s family reportedly encouraged him to stay the course as he spent the day with first lady Jill Biden, his children and grandchildren, with the possibility of firing campaign advisers said to have been discussed.

Here’s more from Shweta Sharma.

Joe Biden’s defenders rallied to his side on Sunday across the cable news circuit and rejected calls for the president to drop out of the 2024 race.

Chief among them was John Fetterman, whose own rocky debate performance in 2022 following a stroke was thought by some to have been a death knell of the now-senator’s campaign.

The Pennsylvania senator appeared on Fox News Sunday, where host Shannon Bream asked him about calls from Democratic supporters as well as media outlets such as The New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution arguing that the president should immediately step aside and allow Democrats to pick a successor.

“There’s no value in any of those things,” Fetterman told Bream, after mockingly clutching his cheeks and quipping, “oh no!”.

“There was the same kind of a freakout after my debate, and in fact I might even say that I had a more difficult evening than the president did. And here I am right now, having this conversation.”

“You might think these three are exceptions to the rule. Most people in their dotage are delightful, quietly getting on with their retirement by making jam and sucking on endless Werther’s Originals, or volunteering with local charities, where they like to teach the paid employees a thing or two…

We also cannot ignore that these three examples are all men. And it does seem to be a particularly (though not uniquely) male tendency to become an ever more braggadocious know-it-all as time goes on.”

The Biden campaign announced they have raised more than $33 million since the first presidential debate on Thursday, including $26 million from grassroots donations – amid concerns from Democrats about his ability to win the 2024 presidential election.

The campaign said that Thursday was their best grassroots fundraising day and Friday was the second best.