Former White House Photographer Joins Call for Biden to Drop Out: Report

Former White House photographer Chandler West has joined calls for President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race after his dismal performance during Thursday night’s debate, Axios reported on Sunday.

Biden’s lackluster performance during CNN’s Thursday night presidential debate in Atlanta against former President Donald Trump reportedly sparked panic among the Democratic Party. Biden was supposed to come across as youthful and energetic amid mounting concerns about the 81-year-old’s age. Instead, he rambled through his administration’s accomplishments and goals, and, as The Atlantic columnist Mark Leibovich on Friday wrote, “looked old, sounded old, and yes, is in fact very, very old.” A Biden aide, meanwhile, told Newsweek late Thursday night that the president was battling a cold during the debate.

Some Democrats, and The New York Times editorial board, have called for Biden to end his reelection campaign so the Democratic Party can find a new candidate ahead of its convention in Chicago in August.

West, former White House deputy director of photography under the Biden administration, wrote in an Instagram story after the debate, “It’s time for Joe to go,” Axios reported Sunday.

“I know many of these people and how the White House operates. They will say he has a ‘cold’ or just experienced a ‘bad night,’ but for weeks and months, in private, they have all said what we saw last night—Joe is not as strong as he was just a couple of years ago,” West reportedly wrote.

West told Axios that he wrote the post because “the debate was not the first bad day, and it’s not gonna be the last.”

Newsweek reached out to West and Biden’s campaign via email for comment.

Meanwhile, Axios published an article on Saturday, in which unnamed current and former Biden aides said that the president is mentally engaged from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but outside of this time frame, he is more likely to have verbal mistakes and fatigue.

Trump, who is 78 years old, has also faced scrutiny about his age and cognitive ability, albeit less so than Biden.

Meanwhile, Dr. Michael Bogaisky, an associate professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who specializes in geriatrics, told Newsweek via telephone on Saturday, “In general, as you get older there are issues with memory, with word retrieval…or retrieval times.”

He continued: “And for a guy like [Biden] who’s been a lifelong stutterer and has to compensate for that, the cognitive load that he has to devote to that is very high and as you get older that becomes harder to do. And certainly, later in the day, you can imagine if he’s a little more tired, that all can just become harder and harder.”

Bogaisky also compared the difficulty of Biden’s task during the debate compared to Trump’s.

“With Trump, the types of things that he was trying to communicate, the complexity of thoughts are much less. And the complexity of thoughts that Biden was trying for, whether or not he achieved it, were much more. With a simpler speech pattern and thought pattern, it’s easier.”

During the debate, Trump dodged many questions and had little to say on which exact policies he would enact if reelected. While there were misleading statements from both sides, the former president made more than Biden. CNN counted over 30 false statements made by Trump while the network said Biden made at least nine false or misleading statements during the debate.

Meanwhile, a CBS News/YouGov poll, conducted on June 28 and 29 found that Trump beat Biden on four key criteria during the debate: presenting ideas, appearing presidential, inspiring confidence, and explaining plans and policies.

When asked “Who do you think did the better job, or ‘won’ Thursday’s debate?” 56 percent of voters surveyed answered Trump while 16 percent said Biden.

The poll also revealed that 54 percent of surveyed voters believe Trump should not be running for the Oval Office. This percentage, however, is much better than Biden, with 72 percent of registered voters believing he should not be running for reelection.

The poll, which was published on Sunday, surveyed 1,130 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 points.