A co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project accused President Joe Biden’s team of misleading Americans about the president’s health Saturday.
Biden has faced multiple calls to step aside as the Democratic nominee since a poor performance in a June 27 CNN debate with former President Donald Trump. Steve Schmidt, a one-time Republican strategist, said Biden’s team “gaslit America” in a rant on X, where he denied involvement in Pass the Torch PAC, a group running ads urging Biden to drop out.
“I’ve been a Democrat for 5 years and started a group that helped elect Biden by raising 100 million and running a brilliant campaign that did 3.2 billion in ad impact,” Schmidt posted in response to a post accusing him of supporting Pass the Torch. “The imbeciles who architected the current disaster said it was ineffective. LOL. Biden called to say thanks.”
During the 2020 campaign, Biden never explicitly said he would not run for a second term as president, but comments about being a “transitional” president were interpreted as implying he would only serve one term, the Hill reported last month.
“Then he broke his promise and his team gaslit America and Trump is going to win,” Schmidt said in a follow-on post, referencing efforts to dismiss concerns about Biden’s age. “In fact, he’ll win with a MAGA House and Senate.”
On multiple occasions, Biden said he spoke with people who had died, including claiming to have spoken with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and former French President Francois Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996 on two occasions in February. In September 2022, Biden asked for Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana at a conference on hunger that took place several weeks after Walorski and two staffers were killed in a motor vehicle accident.
Trump leads Biden by 3.0% in a national head-to-head matchup, according to the RealClearPolling average of polls, with the lead expanding to 3.7% when Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West are included in surveys. In 2020, Biden led Trump by 8.6% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls on July 19, while Hillary Clinton led Trump by 2.8% in the RealClearPolitics average on July 19, 2016.
