President Joe Biden said in an interview airing Wednesday that he might reconsider his decision to stay in the race against Donald Trump if a medical condition emerged.
“Is there anything that you would look to you, personally…to say, ‘if I see that, I will reevaluate?'” BET host Ed Gordon asked Biden in an interview conducted Tuesday.
“If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, ‘you got this problem, that problem,'” Biden replied, according to a video clip shared Wednesday ahead of the broadcast.
Biden, 81, has come under increasing pressure from members of his own party to withdraw from the race following his disastrous debate with Trump, 78, in late June.
Earlier Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who is heavily favored to win the powerful state’s coveted U.S. Senate seat in November, urged Biden to step aside.
The Democratic incumbent’s raspy, stiff appearance and occasionally garbled and unfocused answers in that debate spurred panic among his allies about whether he can effectively campaign against Trump or serve another four years in office.
The Biden campaign said during the debate that the president had a cold, and he later said he was exhausted after a grueling stretch of international travel. He reportedly assured nervous Democrats after the debate that he been checked out by a doctor and told his health was fine.
White House physician Kevin O’Connor in February described Biden as a “healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male.”
Biden has repeatedly acknowledged his poor performance. “I made a serious mistake in the whole debate,” Biden said in the BET interview.
But he and his campaign have pushed back on the calls for him to step aside and maintained that he is the Democrat who is best-positioned to beat Trump.
“When I originally ran, you may remember, Ed, I said I was going to be a transitional candidate, and I thought I would be able to move from this, pass it on to someone else,” Biden told Gordon.
“But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided,” he said. “And quite frankly, I think, the only thing age brings is a little bit of wisdom. And I think I’ve demonstrated that I know how to get things done for the country, in spite of the fact that [unintelligible] we couldn’t get it done.”
“But there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that,” Biden said.
The full interview is set to air on Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET, in the middle of the third day of the Republican National Convention.
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