During a high-stakes interview, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos sat down with President Biden to discuss the president’s recent debate performance as well as whether he’s fit to serve for another four years.
TMZ obtained video of Stephanopoulos on the streets of New York City on Tuesday, following the interview, where he was asked whether he thought Biden should step down.
“I don’t think he can serve four more years,” Stephanopoulos responded.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates cited comments from press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during a briefing in response saying that the president is committing to serve a full second term in office.
An ABC News spokesperson said Stephanopoulos was speaking for himself and not the network. Shortly after his comments, Stephanopoulos came out to say, “Earlier today I responded to a question from a passerby. I shouldn’t have.”
“Look, Biden looked better and certainly more coherent than he looked during the debate, but there’s nothing in this interview that is calming nerves of jittery Democrats who fear that Joe Biden is on a trajectory to lose this race, to lose to Donald Trump,” ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl told Stephanopoulos in reaction to the interview on Friday.
Critics have since criticized Biden’s refusal to take a cognitive test after the interview, saying that it is ‘disqualifying’. It was also the president’s first national interview since a disappointing performance in last month’s debate that prompted urging from the media and some Democrats for Biden to scrap his 2024 presidential election plans.
Biden announced at the end of last year that he was running for a second term, though he said his reelection would depend on whether or not he can define what we truly are as Americans.
Since the debate and subsequent interview, Biden has continually made headlines. For instance, saying he would be perfectly happy to lose in a theoretical match-up against former President Trump so long as he “gave it [his] all.”
“In fact, for some of those people, the interview is raising new concerns, particularly the fact that he is unwilling or unaware of the fact that he is in a dire situation here regarding the campaign, that he is losing, in the view of many Democrats and frankly in the polls you cited, that he is losing to Donald Trump,” he said.
The New York Times and a slew of other media outlets have urged Biden to drop out of the 2024 race.
