A reporter for a Washington, D.C., political news site says Democrats are well aware that Joe Biden “does not have the mental acuity that he even had a couple of years ago.”
Joe Concha, a media reporter for The Hill, told Steve Doocy on “Fox & Friends” that Biden does not appear to be up to the task of holding the kind of press conference President Trump routinely holds.
“A lot of Democrats will tell you, at least privately, that he does not have the mental acuity that he even had a couple of years ago and this is a candidate that simply would not able to withstand the type of press conferences that the current president has, as far as them going on for an hour, an hour and a half, taking questions with multiple outlets with no ground rules attached,” Concha said.
Biden hasn’t held a press conference in nearly three months. The Democratic nominee instead occasionally sits for interviews with left-leaning news organizations, often setting ground rules first.
“It’s a lot easier … to have, say, a handpicked interview, where you have ground rules for interviews, with certain outlets that may be friendly to your candidate, as opposed to having a press conference, which Mr. Biden has not done for 80 days,” Concha said.
Biden’s campaign on Monday made a show of announcing that Biden is prepared to appear with Trump for a series of presidential debates, which don’t begin until Sept. 29. In a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said he’s ready.
“While I know no formal debate invitation will be issued to Joe Biden or Donald Trump until after the Party Conventions and the CPD’s invitation process, I wanted to set forth our views on how the Commission should proceed with planning for the fall debates,” Dillon wrote, according to Fox News.
Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, are pushing for the commission to set up more debates that start earlier, Fox reported.
Last week, Zogby International conducted a survey of 1,007 “likely voters” in which 55% said they think the former vice president, 77, “is in the early stages of dementia.”
“Overall, subgroups who normally approve of Trump’s job as president, were the most likely to believe Biden could be suffering from dementia,” the poll found. “Thus, majorities of Republicans (77% more likely/23% less likely) and Independents (56% more likely/44% less likely) thought Joe Biden had early-onset dementia; while nearly a third of Democrats (32% more likely/68% less likely) thought this was the case.”
Trump has blasted Biden – who he calls “Sleepy Joe” – over his repeated verbal stumbles and memory lapses, calling him an old man who should be put in a retirement home.
“They are going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country,” Trump said in early March during a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Sleepy Joe,” Trump added, “he doesn’t even know where he is or what he’s doing or what office he’s running for. Honestly, I don’t think he knows what office he’s running for.”
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