Milwaukee’s mayor on Wednesday chided Democrats for openly panicking over President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance as Republicans prepare to nominate his 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump.
In an interview two weeks before Republicans hold what is expected to be a drama-free convention in his hometown, Cavalier Johnson warned that calls for Biden to step aside were counterproductive and sowed a sense of chaos.
TRUMP INCREASES 6-POINT LEAD AFTER BIDEN DEBATE DISASTER: POLL
“I think they’re raising more questions,” he said. Washington Examiner“And I just don’t think that’s helpful.”
Republicans had been bracing for the possibility that Trump could be sentenced to house arrest or even prison just four days before the Republican convention, following his conviction on charges of bribing his silence in Manhattan.
Instead, the judge in that case pushed the date back to September following a Supreme Court ruling Monday that Trump’s lawyers hope will overturn the verdict.
The ruling was just one lucky break for Trump in recent days. Biden’s debate on Thursday, in which he repeatedly lost his train of thought and struggled to challenge the former president, has unnerved Democrats as lawmakers, privately and in some cases publicly, question whether Biden, 81, can still be their presidential nominee.
Johnson echoed the defense of Biden’s top defenders: that the president had a bad night but that his record will carry him to victory in November.
“We have to look at the totality of his work, his performance in office, and he has had a pretty stellar performance as president of the United States,” he said.
But Johnson also criticized members of his own party for thinking the debate failure was somehow beyond the president’s redress.
On Tuesday, two Democrats from key House districts declared the race for Biden over, while a wave of operatives and pundits have called for Biden to make way for a new candidate.
“I think they’re making the same kind of mistake and they’re looking at a bad debate and not looking at the whole picture,” Johnson said, citing the first presidential debate of President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Obama was widely considered to have lost that debate, but he went on to win a second term.
“In the end, Joe Biden is going to be our nominee,” Johnson said. “Unless Joe Biden comes out and says, ‘Hey, I’m not going to do this,’ then people should support him.”
TO New York Times-The Siena College poll released Wednesday, one of the first since the debate, showed Trump widening his lead against Biden nationally to 6 points, 49%-43%, but Johnson, a Milwaukee native who rose to mayor in 2021, left no ambiguity about where he stands on the president.
“I absolutely support Joe Biden, 100%. He will be our candidate and he will win in November,” he said, noting that Biden proved in 2020 that he can beat Trump to the top spot on the ticket.
Johnson joins other Democrats expressing confidence in Biden, even as his campaign tries to contain a partywide revolt. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Tuesday became the first House Democrat to call on Biden to resign, while his colleagues are said to be circulating a letter urging him to do the same.
Party leaders have so far supported Biden, but in some cases have said it was reasonable for Democrats to want to assess the president’s suitability for office.
For his part, Johnson believes the party should talk about Trump. He worked to get the convention in Milwaukee, calling it an economic win for the city, but suggested the panic over Biden obscured what he described as a steady stream of falsehoods from Trump.
“I mean, if people want to talk about the debate, I mean, President Biden may not have had a nice speech, but he spoke with substance and told the truth, whereas Donald Trump was called out for telling a lie every 90 seconds,” he said.
Johnson has taken a more aggressive stance against Trump ahead of the convention, during which the former president is expected to name his vice presidential nominee.
“Same here, man,” Johnson told reporters after Trump reportedly called Milwaukee a “horrible city” — a comment Trump denies making. Johnson later called the former president’s insistence that he had chosen Milwaukee as the GOP host city a “total fabrication,” and blamed the decision solely on the Republican National Committee.
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Trump won Wisconsin, one of the three blue wall states that carried him to the White House in 2016, by just over 20,000 votes before losing it by almost the same margin four years later.
Democrats are expected to nominate Biden in a virtual roll call vote, perhaps as early as July, but mounting pressure on Biden has raised the prospect of a contested Democratic convention in Chicago later this summer.
