The mayor of Milwaukee chided Democrats on Wednesday for openly panicking over President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance as Republicans prepare to nominate his 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump.
During an interview two weeks before Republicans host what is expected to be a drama-free convention in his home city, Cavalier Johnson warned that calls for Biden to step aside were counterproductive and sowing a sense of chaos.
TRUMP JUMPS OUT TO 6-POINT LEAD FOLLOWING BIDEN’S DEBATE DISASTER: POLL
“I think they’re causing for more questions to come up,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And I just don’t think that’s helpful.”
Republicans had been preparing for the possibility that Trump would be sentenced to house arrest or even jail time just four days before the GOP convention following his hush money conviction in Manhattan.
Instead, the judge in that case pushed the date to September following a Monday Supreme Court ruling that Trump’s lawyers hope will upend the verdict.
The ruling was only one stroke of luck 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 sent Democrats into disarray as lawmakers privately, and in some cases publicly, question whether the 81-year-old Biden can carry on as their presidential nominee.
Johnson echoed the defense of top Biden surrogates: 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 job, his performance in office, and he’s had a pretty stellar performance as president of the United States,” he said.
Yet Johnson also faulted members of his own party for thinking the debate flop was somehow not recoverable for the president.
Two swing-district Democrats in the House declared the race over for Biden on Tuesday, while a wave of operatives and pundits have called for Biden to make way for a new nominee.
“I think they are making the same sort of mistake and looking at a bad debate performance and not looking at the totality,” Johnson said, citing the first presidential debate of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.
Obama was widely perceived to have lost that debate but went on to win a second term.
“Ultimately, Joe Biden is going to be our nominee,” Johnson said. “Unless Joe Biden were to come forward and say, ‘Hey, I’m not going to do this,’ then folks should rally around him.”
A New York Times-Siena College poll released on Wednesday, among the first since the debate, showed Trump widening his lead against Biden nationally to 6 points, 49%-43%, yet Johnson, a Milwaukee native who ascended to the mayor’s office in 2021, left no ambiguity about where he stood on the president.
“I absolutely, 100% support Joe Biden. He will be our nominee, and he will win in November,” he said, noting that Biden proved in 2020 he can beat Trump at the top of the ticket.
Johnson joins other Democrats voicing confidence in Biden even as his campaign attempts to hold back a partywide revolt. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first House Democrat to call on Biden to step down on Tuesday, while his colleagues are said to be circulating a letter that would ask him to do the same.
Party leaders have so far stood by Biden but in some cases called it reasonable that Democrats would want to assess the president’s fitness for office.
Johnson, for his part, believes the party should be talking about Trump. He worked to bring the convention to Milwaukee, seeing it as an economic windfall for the city, but suggested the freakout over Biden obscured what he described as a steady stream of falsehoods from Trump.
“I mean, if folks want to talk about the debate, I mean, President Biden may not have had a pretty delivery, but he did speak with substance, and he did tell the truth where Donald Trump was clocked in at telling a lie every 90 seconds,” he said.
Johnson has taken a more aggressive posture against Trump in the lead-up to the convention, during which the former president is expected to name his vice presidential nominee.
“Right back at ya, buddy,” Johnson retorted to reporters after Trump reportedly called Milwaukee a “horrible city,” a remark Trump denies making. Johnson subsequently called the former president’s insistence that he chose Milwaukee as the GOP host city a “complete fabrication,” crediting the decision to the Republican National Committee alone.
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Trump won Wisconsin, one of three blue wall states that delivered him the White House in 2016, by little more than 20,000 votes before losing it by nearly the same margin four years later.
Democrats are expected to nominate Biden in a virtual roll call vote, perhaps as soon as July, but the mounting pressure on Biden has raised the possibility of a contested Democratic convention in Chicago later this summer.
