Democrat calls on Biden to exit race after ‘he didn’t seem to recognise me’

A US congressman has said he decided to join calls for Joe Biden to exit the presidential race after he claimed the 81-year-old appeared not to recognise him at a recent event.

Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, was one of the first Democrats to call for Biden to drop out of the race shortly after his disastrous debate performance last month. On Friday, Moulton ramped up his efforts to oust the president from the 2024 ticket in a damning op-ed for the Boston Globe .

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Moulton said he met Biden in a small group for the 80th anniversary of D-day in Normandy on 6 June. “For the first time, he didn’t seem to recognise me,” the Democrat wrote. “Of course, that can happen as anyone ages but, as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem.

“It was a crushing realisation, and not because a person I care about had a rough night but because everything is riding on Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump in November.

“America needs him to win and, like most Americans, I’m no longer confident that he can. The president should bow out of the race.”

Last week Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for the 2024 race, was the target of a failed assassination attempt. Moulton said the shooting had “shifted the national conversation for now [but] what hasn’t changed are these basic facts: Biden is trailing Trump in critical swing states, and he has yet to show us that he is willing or able to change his strategy”.

Adam Smith, a Democratic congressman from Washington, had harsher words for Biden on Saturday, saying the president’s campaign team was committing an “epic act of political malpractice” by allowing him to run.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, he said: “Democratic party leaders all across this country need to stop being coy, quiet and polite about it and they need to express firmly their opinion that the president should step aside and they need to go to President Biden’s campaign team and they need to tell him, ‘You are committing an epic act of political malpractice.’ Please stop and please put the interests of the party and the country ahead of the selfish interests of Joe Biden.”

Biden, who is recovering from Covid, has been under intense pressure to resign since his widely panned debate performance last month. While the president has tried to allay fears about his age and mental capacity for the job with a number of TV interviews and public appearances, he has continued to make gaffes and calls for him to go have persisted.

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Last week, at a make-or-break Nato press conference, Biden mistakenly referred to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump” and, earlier in the day, accidentally introduced the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin”.

On Friday, Biden said he was looking forward to “getting back on the campaign trail next week” as the number of Democratic members of Congress calling on him to step aside surpassed 30 .