Democrats were panicking. Donors were despondent. And some elected officials were privately questioning whether their leader should step aside.
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Analysis | In private, Democrats panic. For the Biden campaign, everything is fine.
Campaign officials touted their record fundraising on debate day. White House officials promised that Biden would bounce back at his upcoming North Carolina rally. And Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, told nervous donors at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta on Friday that “nothing fundamentally changed in the race.”
By Tuesday, however, the business-as-usual calm the Biden team sought to impose had backfired, with some Democrats complaining of being gaslit.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) became the first Democratic member of Congress to defect, calling for Biden to drop out of the race, and other Democrats publicly urged Biden to more seriously address his fitness for the job. Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) opened the door to a post-Biden election, saying on MSNBC that he would support Vice President Harris were Biden to step aside.
The public developments represented a striking contrast from the four days after Biden’s halting 2024 debate debut, when his inner circle and campaign team publicly emitted a steady stream of denialism and don’t-believe-your-lying-eyes happy talk, arguing that the 81-year-old president — noticeably slower and physically aged than four years ago — is still the best candidate to defeat Trump in November.
“Joe isn’t just the right person for the job,” first lady Jill Biden said at a fundraiser Saturday in East Hampton, N.Y. “He’s the only person for the job.”
Officials said his post-debate swing re-energized donors and voters, pointing to his $38 million fundraising haul in the days after and his packed rally in Raleigh. They also noted Biden’s top aides made a flurry of private calls to top elected Democrats and donors, to stave off defections and reiterate that Biden had no plans to exit the race.
“We’ve always said this was going to be a close race and a tough campaign, and we’re working incredibly hard to earn every single vote, and taking nothing for granted,” Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said in a statement.
But during the four-state swing after the debate — during which he inaugurated a visitor center at the Stonewall National Monument and attended three fundraisers — Biden’s traveling entourage operated with a breezy, nothing-to-see-here attitude, as if pantomiming a thriving campaign not in the midst of an existential crisis.
A top aide to the first lady danced as Diana Ross blared on the tarmac in Raleigh, , N.C. in the wee hours of Friday. Mike Donilon, a longtime confidant to the president and chief strategist of his campaign, eschewed a suit for casual summer wear: seersucker short-sleeve, button-down shirt and suede, horsebit loafers. And aides scoffed at reporters when they asked the president whether he planned to drop out.
Two of Biden’s granddaughters joined him for the final day of the swing, before they reunited with the rest of the Biden clan ahead of a scheduled family photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz at Camp David — a tableau that, as party leaders privately fretted about a second Trump term ushering in the end of American democracy, had echoes of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
But as Democratic strategists, elected officials and liberal pundits publicly and privately called for — at the very least — a serious discussion about whether Biden should step aside, he and his campaign instead offered business-as-usual spin.
“It’s a familiar story: Following Thursday night’s debate, the Beltway class is counting Joe Biden out,” Dillon wrote in an email blasted out Saturday evening. “The data in the battleground states, though, tells a different story.”
But a sentence about polling later in Dillon’s memo belied her studied nonchalance, seeming to acknowledge that Biden might very well drop in the polls as voters continue to process Biden’s debate stage performance: “If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” she wrote.
Shortly after Dillon’s memo, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty also sent out an email full of “helpful” responses to help calm nervous Democrats.
“If you’re like me, you’re getting lots of texts or calls from folks about the state of the race after Thursday. Maybe it was your panicked aunt, your MAGA uncle, or some self-important Podcasters,” Flaherty wrote, before offering such suggested talking points as “the long-term impact of debates is overstated anyway” and “90 minutes does not negate 3-½ years of results.”
The Biden operation appears to think it has no choice but to proceed as if his meandering debate performance — his voice was frail, his thoughts were garbled, and he failed to meaningfully fact check Trump — was merely an aberration.
To even entertain the criticism ricocheting around their party would be to tacitly acknowledge what many Democratic voters have long feared and what some officials and strategists have long whispered: That Biden is too old to run for a second term, and that he should have kept his promise to serve as a “bridge” to the next generation and bowed out in time for a vigorous Democratic primary.
Now, however, Biden’s team finds itself taking what Democratic critics point to as hubris and selfishness and repackaging it as resilience.
Inside Biden’s inner circle, the latest round of criticism — particularly from editorial boards and pundits — is being dismissed as the standard underestimation of Biden’s ability. Aides have been quick to remind anxious allies and donors of when Democrats said Biden needed to drop out of the Democratic primary in 2020 after losing badly in Iowa and New Hampshire before going on to win the nomination and defeat Trump. And they have also noted that Biden, who has suffered great personal tragedy, has weathered much tougher times and will bounce back.
As evidence, they pointed to his boisterous rally in Raleigh the day after the debate — where an adoring crowd of more than 2,000 people cheered for him and Biden delivered a fierce defense of his ability to serve as president.
“I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth,” Biden said. “I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done.”
The Biden campaign is also trying to stay focused on their original theory of the case — that this election needs to be a referendum on the former president, not the sitting one.
During the debate itself, for instance, almost three-quarters of Biden’s social media posts mentioned Trump, while other left-wing political influencers posted more frequently about how old Biden appeared and critiqued his performance, according to a Washington Post analysis of social media posts, podcasts and other public statements.
In the days after the debate, the trend continued. More than half of Biden’s social media posts about the debate focused on Trump and his performance, while only a few addressed Biden’s own age.
The Biden strategy of happy talk, however, comes with risks, making the president and his team seem out of touch with reality.
Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic strategist, said she thinks the Biden operation “would have been better off sticking with honesty.”
“You can’t tell people they didn’t see what they saw,” Rosen said. ” To try to turn this around and try to make it be everybody else’s fault — it’s not only offensive, it just isn’t going to fly.”
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.
A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.
The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.
The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”
Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”
But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.
In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.
Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
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