Biden refuses cognitive test, brushes off ‘bad night’ in ABC News interview: updates

Minnesota Representative Angie Craig has called for President Joe Biden to “step aside” from the 2024 presidential race because of his poor debate performance.

“I have great respect for President Biden’s decades of service to our nation and his steadfast commitment to making our country a better place,” Craig wrote.

“However, given what I saw and heard from the President during last week’s debate in Atlanta, coupled with the lack of a forceful response from the President himself following the debate, I do not believe that the President can effectively campaign and win against Donald Trump,” she continued.

Craig said she did not come to her decision lightly but believes there is “too much at stake” to risk losing the election to Trump.

She asked the president to make room for a new generation of leaders within the party.

President Joe Biden said the first presidential debate was a “bad night” for him but assured Americans that he is still well enough to run a successful presidential campaign and defeat Donald Trump in November.

When speaking with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Friday evening, Biden raised various reasons why he did not do well in the debate including that Donald Trump distracted him, he was tired, had recently been traveling, had a cold and did not prepare well.

“ It was a bad episode. No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn’t listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and– and a bad night,” Biden said.

It was an absurd hypothetical raised by an appeals court judge to point out the literally unbelievable and dangerous consequences of the legal argument from Donald Trump’s attorneys.

But it landed as a shocking warning from a Supreme Court justice in an earthquaking decision this week that shields Trump from accountability for crimes committed in office.

In his energetic rally speech in Wisconsin on Friday, Biden laid out the stakes of the 2024 election, once again warning that the fate of American democracy hangs in the balance if Trump wins.

He referenced Trump’s criminal convictions for falsifying business records to pay off a porn star, and how a jury determined that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll and then awarded her $90m for defaming her.

The “so-called great businessman” was fined $400m for fraud in his civil trial in New York, Biden said.

“He’s not just a convicted criminal, he’s a one-man crime wave,” Biden said.

Biden also referenced Trump’s threats to abortion rights and his opposition to gun control measures in the middle of a gun violence crisis.

“Let’s exile Trump politically,” Biden said before leaving the stage.

Project 2025’s 900-page manifesto for nearly every detail of a second Trump presidency was drawn up by more than a dozen former Trump administration officials and advisers, who have planned to “integrate” the document into the campaign’s platform in the coming months.

But on Friday, as his Democratic rivals use Project 2025 as shorthand for his agenda, Trump claimed that he the proposal is news to him.

AOC is filing impeachment articles. Other Democrats are backing a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling. Ethics investigations are underway. And Biden is once again facing calls to back an expansion of the bench.

Here’s how Democrats in Congress are pushing to overhaul the Supreme Court:

“I have the answer to the Crooked Joe Biden Incompetence Puzzle — Let’s do another Debate, but this time, no holds barred,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social during the Fourth of July holiday.

Trump’s allies are now suggesting that, if elected, Trump should restart underground nuclear weapons testing, a practice that the US gave up more than 30 years ago, and if resumed would likely fuel a global arms race in a volatile political moment.

Nuclear weapons testing and weapon stockpiling are also key parts of the defense recommendations in Project 2025, the 900-page Heritage Foundation-backed manifesto for Trump’s second term, and authored by Trump’s former defense secretary.

President Biden dodged questions about whether he would be willing to undergo an independent medical evaluation that included neurological and cognitive cognitive tests and then release the results to the American people.

Speaking during a sit-down ABC interview he said: “Look, I have a cognitive test every single day.

“Every day I have that test – everything we do, you know, not only in my campaign, but I’m running the world, and that’s not how it sounds like hyperbole, but we are the central nation of the world.”

Pressed again by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos on taking such tests and making the results public, he said: “Watch me between, there’s a lot of time left in this campaign – over 125 days.”