The fallout from President Joe Biden’s abysmal debate performance last week reached his wife’s ill-timed Vogue cover story Monday, with first lady Jill Biden using the piece to signal that her husband isn’t about to quit his re-election race.
In an editor’s note at the top of the article, the magazine highlighted that Joe Biden’s monumentally dreadful showing against Donald Trump on Thursday had “spurred a discussion” about whether the president should remain the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Speaking from Camp David, where the Biden clan holed up over the weekend, Jill Biden told Vogue that the family “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight.” She added that her 81-year-old husband “will always do what’s best for the country.”
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Jill Biden’s 11th-hour addendum to the piece came on the same weekend that she and her family were reportedly gathered at the president’s country residence partly to have their pictures taken by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, according to The New York Times. The get-together marked the first time that all the family came together in one place since Hunter Biden’s conviction on federal gun charges last month.
It was also at that family meeting that the president’s loved ones encouraged him to stay in the race and persist with his likely rematch against Trump in November. Hunter Biden was among those most vociferous about his father staying on the ticket, while at least one of the president’s grandkids expressed interest in helping the Biden campaign potentially by reaching out to social media influencers, according to the Times.
The family’s resolve comes in stark contrast to the panic that the debate set off among Biden’s supporters, with even some of his own friends calling for him to step down before it’s too late. Others have appealed directly to members of the president’s family—including the first lady—to convince him to abandon his re-election campaign and allow a successor to emerge before November.
The magnitude of what’s on the line in the 2024 presidential election clearly isn’t lost on Jill Biden. “Each campaign is unique. But this one, the urgency is different,” she was quoted as saying in the main text of the Vogue piece. “We know what’s at stake. Joe is asking the American people to come together to draw a line in the sand against all this vitriol.”
Despite the pleas from some quarters for Biden to now drop his campaign—with many Democratic lawmakers apparently anonymously airing their anxieties to the media—the president has nevertheless received the public support of some senior Democratic figures.
“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” former President Barack Obama wrote in an X post Friday. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
Former President Bill Clinton said he’d “leave the debate rating to the pundits” in his own post last week, before arguing that Biden has “given us 3 years of solid leadership” which pulled the U.S. “out of the quagmire Donald Trump left us in.” “That’s what’s really at stake in November,” he wrote.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) echoed Obama’s sentiments during a Meet the Press interview Sunday. Asked if he thought Biden should drop out, Warnock answered: “Absolutely not.” “There’ve been more than a few Sundays when I wished I had preached a better sermon,” the pastor lawmaker said. “But after the sermon was over, it was my job to embody the message, to show up for the people that I serve. And that’s what Joe Biden has been doing.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) likewise told MSNBC that Biden’s debate performance was a “setback” but reiterated his belief that a “setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”
