The Campaign Moment: Trump rides the wave of Biden turmoil
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
This week, Biden vowed in his high-stakes press conference on Thursday night to remain in the race, but it’s unclear if his message satisfied voters.
His speech followed new polling this week that suggests that more than half of Democrats want Biden to drop out of the race. It also found that the overall race hasn’t changed much, and that Trump and Biden are locked in a dead heat.
Post Reports co-host Martine Powers talks with senior political reporter Aaron Blake and national politics reporter Hannah Knowles about how Democratic voters and politicians feel about Biden, and why Trump has been so quiet during a tumultuous moment in his opponent’s campaign. They also dig into what to expect at next week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Today’s show was produced by Laura Benshoff. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and Mary Jo Murphy and mixed by Rennie Svirnovskiy.
Subscribe to Aaron’s newsletter, The Campaign Moment, here.
Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so last night was Biden's big test, this news conference that was essentially set up to save the candidacy of President Biden. |
| 0:13.4 | And I will say it was somewhat of a mixed bag. |
| 0:16.1 | Let's take a listen first to one of the moments where he's talking about the war in Gaza |
| 0:21.2 | and it sounded like a totally normal press conference. |
| 0:25.0 | So there's a lot of things in retrospect I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do. |
| 0:32.0 | But the bottom line is we have a chance now. It's time to end this war. |
| 0:37.0 | And then here is one of the more cringe moments. |
| 0:42.0 | Look, I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be Vice President, |
| 0:47.0 | but I think she was not qualified to be President. |
| 0:49.0 | So here he's mixing up the name of the vice president and his opponent Aaron and |
| 0:55.6 | Hannah on a scale of 1 to 10 like what level flub was that in isolation it's like a |
| 1:01.8 | three but next to everything else. It's probably like a seven. |
| 1:05.0 | Yeah, I hard agree. You know people are talking how he had a really good press conference |
| 1:11.2 | But it was clearing a pretty low bar that he had set for himself. |
| 1:15.6 | I think that if you had doubts about Biden you still have them you still maybe want him off the |
| 1:21.8 | ticket but there's enough there that it's it's much |
| 1:24.9 | harder for them to push him out. |
| 1:31.2 | Welcome to the campaign moment it It's Friday, July 12th. I'm Martine Powers, co-host of |
| 1:37.0 | post reports. |
| 1:38.0 | And I'm Aaron Blake, author of the campaign moment newsletter and senior political reporter. |
| 1:42.3 | Today we're joined by Hannah campaign moment newsletter and senior political reporter. |
| 1:43.3 | Today we're joined by Hannah Knowles, a national reporter here at the post who covers campaigns. |
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