President Biden, who in the past has batted away questions about his advanced age by telling skeptics to “watch me,” will have one of the most consequential audiences of his political career as he steps to the lectern in Washington and faces a horde of journalists on Thursday. Members of Congress, Democratic donors, party strategists, voters, foreign leaders and officials within his own White House are planning to tune in for what is expected to be a real-time test of Biden’s ability to think on his feet and deliver under pressure.

The pivotal event comes as Biden is trying to save his candidacy and convince Democrats that his faltering debate performance last month was simply a “bad night” and not indicative of a broader decline in his cognitive abilities. The outsize importance of the news conference also underscores how Biden’s attempts over the past two weeks to downplay his debate stumbles and move forward with his presidential campaign have so far failed to convince many in his party.

Even as the president has defiantly declared that he will stay in the race and shored up his support this week by winning over key constituencies, the number of top Democrats who have remained silent or voiced only tepid support indicates that a poor showing at the news conference could unleash a fresh wave of defections. Anxious Democrats fear Biden’s weak showing in polls and halting public appearances could pave the way for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a prospect some have described as an existential threat to the country’s democracy.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that he remained “deeply concerned” about Biden’s prospects against Trump, joining the chorus of Democrats who have argued that Biden needs to do more in the days ahead to reassure voters and lawmakers.

“I think he needs to continue effectively and aggressively making his case to the American people and earning their support, as well as a number of my colleagues,” he said.

Biden’s aides have suggested that the president’s activity over the past two weeks — which has included multiple rallies, a handful of interviews, some well-received speeches, impromptu conversations with supporters and a hosting role at the NATO summit in Washington — have helped him stem the calls for him to drop out of the race. Campaign officials pointed to the president’s defiant letter Monday asserting that he would remain in the race and highlighted the statements of support he has received from some Democratic officials in recent days.

Still, several party leaders remain skeptical, and some have warned that Biden’s inability to quickly bounce back from the debate with public displays of vigor has been particularly concerning. Democratic lawmakers have said for days that they wanted to see Biden in more unscripted settings, speaking without notes or a teleprompter, to show that the debate in which he often struggled to complete his sentences was just a one-off.

That the news conference is coming a full two weeks after the debate has struck some in the party as a telling sign, and several Democratic aides and lawmakers have predicted that the president will perform poorly before a press corps primed to ask challenging questions about his age and acuity.

Several congressional aides and some lawmakers, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said they see the news conference as the first real test of the 81-year-old’s cognitive abilities since the June 27 debate, noting that he will not have a script and will have to navigate a wide-ranging set of questions. The event caps NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, which Biden hosted this week, though questions about his political standing and health are likely to dominate.

Biden will face reporters at a time when many in his party are demoralized over his weak standing in the presidential race, in the wake of several polls showing him trailing Trump in key swing states. While Trump, 78, is only slightly younger than Biden, voters have expressed far more concern about Biden’s ability to serve as president for four more years. In a New York Times-Siena College poll released after the debate, 74 percent of voters viewed Biden as too old to serve effectively as president; 42 percent said the same about Trump.

On Tuesday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said on CNN that he feared Biden was on track to lose to Trump in a “landslide” and that the White House needed to do more to “demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election.”

On Wednesday, Biden faced a new round of skepticism, with more lawmakers either calling for him to step aside or saying they wanted him to show more political vitality before they could fully support him. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) became the first senator to publicly call on Biden to step aside, in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) repeatedly urged Biden to make a decision about whether to stay in the presidential race, despite the president’s insistence that he has already made up his mind to remain at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Also on Wednesday, George Clooney, the Hollywood actor and a top fundraiser for Biden’s reelection, called for the president to be replaced as the Democratic nominee. In a New York Times op-ed, Clooney, who hosted Biden for a fundraiser last month, suggested that the president was losing the battle with time.

“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

The flurry of doubt surrounding the president raises the stakes for his news conference, according to several Democratic officials, who indicated they will be watching closely for any stumbles or signs of weakness. For their part, Biden’s aides are hoping a solid showing Thursday will help him finally put the drama over the debate in the rearview mirror.

Supporters and detractors alike have noted that timing could be in Biden’s favor. If he makes it through the news conference without sparking a fresh round of intraparty panic, focus will begin to shift toward Trump and the Republicans, who are holding their nominating convention next week. Trump is expected to announce his running mate in coming days, and Congress will be out of session next week.

Biden has not always performed well at major solo news conferences, which have been rarities during his presidency.

In January 2022, Biden stood before reporters for nearly two hours, fielding inquiries on a wide range of issues and occasionally getting testy with journalists who asked pointed questions.

After the event, first lady Jill Biden berated the president’s aides for allowing the event to go on so long, according to the book “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden.”

Since then, the president has held significantly fewer substantive engagements with the media compared with his predecessors.

Biden has participated in 36 news conferences during his presidency, the fewest of any president during the same period since Ronald Reagan, according to data compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, professor emerita of political science at Towson University and the director of the White House Transition Project.

Biden has largely favored so-called two-by-two news conferences, in which he addresses the media while standing next to a foreign leader, with questions limited to two journalists from each country’s delegation. He often keeps his answers brief, rarely engaging in the kind of lengthy, professorial responses embraced by former president Barack Obama or the long-winded riffs by Trump.

In recent press appearances, Biden has occasionally read his answers from notecards rather than speaking extemporaneously. His voice at times has been low and gravelly. He has sometimes mixed up names or stopped himself midsentence rather than completing his thought, with Republicans seizing on each flub.

White House aides, who often determine which journalists are called on, have occasionally tried to fish out the substance of reporters’ questions ahead of the events, a practice that predates Biden’s presidency but has gained additional scrutiny due to the focus on the president’s mental acuity.

Two radio hosts said Saturday that they were supplied questions from Biden aides before separate interviews with him last week, a practice the campaign initially defended but later said it would refrain from going forward.

Republicans responded by suggesting that Biden was not mentally fit to answer unscripted questions. Officials from the Republican National Committee — who have become adept at taking clips of Biden’s stumbles at public appearances and circulating them — have often lambasted the president during news conferences and suggested, without evidence, that the events are scripted.

In addition to the content of his answers and his delivery, the president’s demeanor will also be in focus as party officials scrutinize whether he appears vigorous enough to carry Democrats’ message against Trump in coming months.

Biden has sometimes bristled over reporters’ attempts to ask multiple questions or lashed out at journalists who query him about issues that he considers off-topic.

The conference will cap a NATO summit during which the president announced that new F-16 fighter jets would be going to Ukraine; praised member countries for increasing their defense spending; and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

While several journalists are likely to query Biden on Thursday about the 2024 race and the issues that have come to dominate it — his age, health and political standing — world leaders will also be watching the news conference to see whether the president shows proficiency and deftness on a range of global issues.

For his part, Biden has suggested that he will use his future public appearances to challenge Trump more directly, and he told donors Monday that he would take a different approach to a future debate with the presumptive Republican nominee.

“Attack, attack, attack, attack,” he said.

Jacqueline Alemany, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Marianna Sotomayor, Mariana Alfaro and Liz Goodwin contributed to this report.

Most Democrats nationwide say that President Biden should end his reelection campaign based on his performance in the presidential debate two weeks ago, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.

The poll results contradict Biden’s claim that only party elites want him to step aside. He has said that positive interactions with supporters on the campaign trail have helped persuade him to stay in the race after a debate in which he trailed off and occasionally appeared confused. But the poll finds that 56 percent of Democrats say that he should end his candidacy, while 42 percent say he should continue to seek reelection. Overall, 2 in 3 adults say the president should step aside, including more than 7 in 10 independents.

The poll finds Biden and former president Donald Trump in a dead heat in the contest for the popular vote, with both candidates receiving 46 percent support among registered voters. Those numbers are nearly identical to the results of an ABC-Ipsos poll in April.

That finding is at odds with some other recent public polls. Across eight other post-debate national polls tracked by The Post, Trump leads by 3.5 percentage points on average, compared with a one-point Trump edge in those same polls before the debate. Biden led Trump by between nine and 11 points in averages of public polls at this point in the campaign four years ago. He ended up winning by 4.5 points.

The president and his campaign team have spent the week seeking to enlist support from important Democratic Party constituencies, including the Congressional Black Caucus, labor leaders and key progressive legislators, but with limited success. By early Wednesday evening, 13 Democrats in the House and Senate had called for Biden to drop out, though one, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), has since softened his position.

Also on Wednesday, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urged Biden to make a decision about whether to drop out of the presidential race, a sign that she and other Democrats don’t believe that Biden’s statements insisting he will stay in have settled the issue.

The poll shows the degree to which Democrats across the country were alarmed by what they saw in the debate. Many Democrats fear that, if Biden continues his candidacy, Trump could have an easier path to victory and that Republicans could end up holding majorities in both the House and Senate, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said during an interview on CNN on Tuesday night.

The survey finds little change in Biden’s job approval, with 57 percent disapproving, identical to the percentage in an April ABC-Ipsos poll. Among Democrats, 75 percent approve of Biden’s performance while 22 percent disapprove, also little changed in the past few months. Americans’ views of Trump and his performance as president has also changed little since before the debate, with 43 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving.

Yet last month’s debate, which most Americans say they watched or followed news about, appears to have heightened concerns about Biden’s age and fitness for office. The share of Americans saying Biden is more mentally sharp than Trump dropped from 23 percent in April to 14 percent this month. The share saying Biden is in better physical health than Trump dropped from 20 percent to 13 percent.

Trump did not make large gains on these questions; instead, growing numbers say neither candidate has the sharpness or physical health needed for the presidency. Most Americans say both Biden and Trump are too old to serve another term as president, rising from 53 percent in April to 58 percent now. The share saying only Biden is too old is unchanged at 28 percent, along with the 2 percent who say only Trump is too old.

In total, 85 percent say Biden is too old while 60 percent say Trump is too old. In April, 81 percent said Biden was too old and 55 percent said Trump was too old.

Still, the new poll does not show movement in the voters’ intentions since the debate. In April, registered voters split 46 percent for Biden and 45 percent for Trump, with both now at 46 percent. Each candidate’s strength is among his party, with 92 percent of Democratic voters saying they’d vote for Biden in a two-way race and 93 percent of Republicans saying they’d support Trump. Among self-identified independents, the two are virtually tied, with Trump at 42 percent and Biden at 40 percent.

When third-party candidates are included, the margin between Biden and Trump does not shift significantly, with 42 percent supporting Biden and 43 percent supporting Trump. Another 9 percent of registered voters support Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 2 percent for Cornel West and 2 percent for Jill Stein.

Democrats have not come to a consensus about who should replace Biden if he steps aside, though Vice President Harris has far more support than other potential candidates.

In response to an open-ended question, 29 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents volunteered Harris, while 7 percent mentioned California Gov. Gavin Newsom, 4 percent named Michelle Obama and 3 percent apiece named Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Half did not name a specific individual as an alternative to Biden.

In a separate question, 70 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they would be “satisfied” if Harris replaced Biden as the party’s presidential nominee. That rises to 85 percent among Black Democrats, but large majorities of Democrats across demographic groups also say they’d be satisfied with Harris.

Harris faces more headwinds from the broader electorate, with 53 percent of Americans overall saying they’d be dissatisfied with Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee, including 58 percent of political independents. Two-thirds of Black Americans (67 percent) would be satisfied with Harris replacing Biden, compared with 51 percent of Hispanic Americans and 38 percent of Whites.

But in a separate ballot test, the poll finds Harris receiving 49 percent to Trump’s 47 percent among registered voters. But that two-point difference is not statistically significant. There are also not large differences between Harris’s coalition and Biden’s, with almost all demographic groups statistically even on both Biden and Harris. One exception are voters who “disapprove somewhat” of Biden’s performance: 60 percent support Harris against Trump, compared with 50 percent who support Biden.

The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll finds a sharp racial divide within Biden’s party over his candidacy, with 63 percent of Black Democrats saying Biden should continue while 59 percent of Hispanic Democrats and 64 percent of White Democrats say Biden should step aside based on his debate performance. Democrats older than 50 are roughly divided over whether Biden’s should continue, while 6 in 10 younger Democrats say he should step aside.

There is no ideological divide among Democrats about whether Biden should quit the race or remain as a candidate, with 55 percent of liberal Democrats wanting Biden to drop out along with 57 percent of moderate and conservative Democrats saying the same.

In a rousing campaign rally the day after the debate, Biden said “I might not walk as easily or talk as smoothly as I used to,” but “what I do know is how to tell the truth.” He criticized Trump for lying and making repeated false claims during the debate.

Perceptions of honesty stand out as a clear advantage for Biden against Trump, with 39 percent of Americans saying Biden is more honest and trustworthy than Trump. Twenty-two percent say Trump is more honest and trustworthy than Biden and 39 percent who say neither is honest.

The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll finds Biden holds smaller advantages over Trump on which candidate “represents your personal values” and whether he will “protect American democracy.”

Yet Americans split almost evenly on which candidate “understands the problems of people like you,” with 34 percent saying Biden is more empathetic, 32 percent saying Trump is and 34 percent saying neither is. Four years ago, a Post-ABC telephone poll found Biden with a 17 percentage-point advantage on a similar question.

The poll finds the CNN debate in Atlanta was a political debacle for Biden but not a triumph for Trump. Just 7 percent of Americans say Biden won the debate, while 46 percent say Trump won and 45 percent say neither prevailed or that it was a tie. Half of Americans say the debate made them think “less favorably” of Biden while less than one-quarter say this about Trump.

Half of all adults (50 percent) say that, based on his performance at the debate, Trump should step aside while 47 percent say he should remain in the race. But the big difference between Biden and Trump is that almost 9 in 10 Republicans continue to favor Trump continuing to run and a much larger majority of independents say Biden should get out than say the same about the former president.

The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll was conducted July 5-9 among 2,431 U.S. adults through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, a survey panel recruited through random sampling of households across the country. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points; the error margin is 3.5 points among the sample of 825 self-identified Democrats and three points among the sample of 1,255 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

President Biden sent a message to restive Democrats on Capitol Hill at the beginning of the week in a sternly worded letter: I am staying in this race, and you need to accept that.

But many Democratic lawmakers have instead painted a picture of a president deep in thought over whether to continue his reelection campaign following a halting debate performance, insisting that Biden is close to making a “decision” on his political future. Their carefully crafted statements praise Biden while also rejecting the president’s contention that his candidacy is a settled matter after the debate two weeks ago.

“I have complete confidence that Joe Biden will do the patriotic thing for our country,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said to one reporter when asked on Wednesday if he believes Biden should step aside. “He’s going to make that decision. He’s never disappointed me; he’s always put patriotism and the country ahead of himself and I’m going to respect the decision he makes.’

The subtle rhetoric may be a tad removed from the current reality, but it avoids directly confronting a president who has been described as dug in on his candidacy and angry at the constant questioning from his own party. It also leaves the door open for lawmakers to notch up the pressure in future days and sends a message that they’d be more than open to a different decision from Biden.

The most high-profile Hill Democrat to frame the issue this way is undoubtedly former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who praised Biden in a television interview on Wednesday. But she also urged the president to quickly decide whether he is still running.

“We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short,” Pelosi said.

The strategy, ignoring Biden’s public posture on his own run, risks being perceived as condescending to some, however.

“This is beginning to feel like when you turn in a paper and the teacher gives it back and tells you to rewrite it and then hand it in again,” Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz joked on X.

But it may be a way to gently encourage a change of heart. Some lawmakers say they believe Biden when he says he is committed to running but are still hoping the incoming raft of dismal polls could change his mind. On Wednesday, Cook Political report analyst David Wasserman described Trump’s lead in the polls post-debate as “the most drastic shift in the race all year.”

When asked about lawmakers’ contention that Biden needs to “decide” whether he’s running or not, a Biden campaign official pointed to his letter to lawmakers on Monday, in which Biden declared, “I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.”

Biden added that it was time for discussions to “end” about a different way forward. In an MSNBC interview, he also dismissed “elites” who have questions about his ability to run, arguing they’re not listening to regular voters. That comment angered many lawmakers, according to two people familiar with the reaction who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Neither Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) nor House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have joined in on framing Biden as needing to make a “decision.”

“As I have made clear repeatedly publicly and privately, I support President Biden and remain committed to ensuring Donald Trump is defeated in November,” Schumer said in a statement Wednesday evening.

The careful rhetoric shows the tightrope lawmakers are walking as they seek to send a message to Biden without permanently alienating him if he stays in the race or further hurting Democrats’ chances in the election by airing more negative perceptions of Biden.

So far, just one Democratic senator, Peter Welch of Vermont, has called on Biden to step aside. But several more privately expressed their concerns that he would not be able to win in November in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, according to two people briefed on the gathering. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) later aired his concerns publicly on CNN, saying that Democrats could lose in a “landslide” with Biden atop the ticket, while stopping short of calling on him to bow out of the race.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Biden’s campaign co-chair, downplayed the importance of Bennet’s comments.

“I respect my dear friend Michael Bennet; I do not share his views,” he said. “We have 51 members who caucus with the Democrats and have there been a dozen others who have come forth and said, ‘now that Michael has shared that they share the same view?’ I don’t think so.”

Some lawmakers, including Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), have affirmatively made the case that Biden is the best person to lead the presidential ticket and can defeat Trump. “He’s our guy,” Fetterman told reporters this week. But many share deep concerns they are headed for defeat, even if they are divided about the right path forward.

On Thursday, top Biden officials Mike Donilon, Jen O’Malley Dillon and Steve Ricchetti will brief Senate Democrats at lunch at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Until then, lawmakers are urging Biden to make a decision, even if he says he already has.

“I think he’s the kind of person that in the end it’s not going to be about him, it’s going to be about what’s best for the country,” said Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.).

And is the best decision for Biden to continue running, a reporter asked? “I think what’s best is to win,’ he said.

Mariana Alfaro and Paul Kane contributed to this report

“Something I’ve heard that doesn’t seem to be being covered are the Epstein files. These files were released. And, like, Donald Trump is sort of all over this. There are pictures of him with Epstein. He’s taken multiple plane flights with Epstein with young girls on board. He’s in call logs with Epstein. One of the highest trending hashtags on Twitter right now is about Trump and Epstein. … You all might want to look at that. Because that’s highly disturbing.”

— Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), remarks to reporters, July 9

Florida Circuit Judge Luis Delgado unsealed nearly 200 pages of grand jury testimony last week related to the 2006 Florida case involving disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was alleged to have raped teenage girls. In 2019, after he was charged in federal court with sex trafficking of minors, guards found Epstein dead in his cell at a federal jail in New York. Investigators said he hanged himself.

The documents showed that prosecutors had heard testimony about Epstein assaulting teenage girls before they cut a plea deal with him in 2008 that was kept from victims and provided for lenient work-release. “The details in the record will be outrageous to decent people,” Delgado wrote in his order. “The testimony taken by the grand jury concerns activity ranging from grossly unacceptable to rape — all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, disgusting, and criminal.”

But Donald Trump’s name never appears anywhere in the transcripts.

That hasn’t stopped Democrats — perhaps seeking to distract from President Biden’s travails — from suggesting on social media that there’s a disturbing connection between the former president and a sex predator. Some social media posts have claimed that Trump was mentioned in a draft indictment released last week, but that’s false. Only 2006 grand jury testimony was released.

Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist whose diligent reporting forced a reopening of the Epstein case, has valiantly tried to point out the errors on X, but the misinformation keeps spreading. “I’ve come to believe that the American public won’t pay for the truth,” she lamented. “They would rather believe the lies they get for free on the internet.”

(Trump may have fueled some of this speculation by hedging in a recent Fox News interview about whether he’d seek to release all documents related to Epstein. “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there,” he said.)

When we asked Lieu’s office for evidence to back up his speculation, we were supplied with a variety of old Washington Post articles that explored the links between Trump and Epstein. But, contrary to Lieu’s statement, none shows that Trump engaged in anything inappropriate. Let’s explore what’s in the public record.

‘Pictures of him with Epstein’

Trump has acknowledged that he and Epstein were in the same Palm Beach social circle decades ago. But their relations appeared to have ended by the time Epstein’s legal troubles began.

There are numerous photos of Trump and Epstein. In 2019, NBC News released video of Trump keeping company with Epstein at a 1992 party with NFL cheerleaders. At one point, Trump points out someone to Epstein and appears to say, “She’s hot!”

In 2002, Trump was quoted in a profile of Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

But as The Washington Post reported, the relationship soured in 2004 after the two men battled over acquiring a choice Palm Beach property, an oceanfront mansion called Maison de l’Amitie. Trump won the auction, and phone records — the call logs Lieu referenced — indicate that the two men did not communicate after that. Two weeks after the auction, Palm Beach police received a tip that young women were seen coming and going from Epstein’s home — which led to the grand jury investigation.

‘Multiple plane flights with Epstein’

Many prominent people, including former president Bill Clinton, flew on Epstein’s jet. Trump took at least seven flights with Epstein in the 1990s, according to flight logs released as evidence in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping him sexually abuse girls. Lieu claimed that “young girls were on board,” but no evidence of that has surfaced. The ages of passengers were not recorded in the logs.

Trump took flights between Palm Beach and New York City airports. A June 1994 flight lists some of the other passengers as Marla and Tiffany, an apparent reference to Trump’s then-wife, Marla Maples, and their less than 1-year-old daughter.

‘Highly disturbing’

Trump was briefly mentioned in about 1,000 pages of documents released in January in a separate case involving a defamation suit filed against Maxwell by an alleged victim, Virginia Giuffre. (Lieu’s staff sent an article about those documents.)

But these were minor references.

In a 2016 deposition of Giuffre that was released, she was asked about Trump. Giuffre said she had been recruited by Maxwell when she was a 17-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago.

“I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said. “That would have to be another assumption. I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein.”

She said that anyone who visited Epstein’s house would have seen his many nude photos of women displayed on the walls. “These are salacious acts of girls, young girls doing things to each other that would be considered child pornography,” Giuffre testified. “If you walked foot into Jeffrey Epstein’s house and you went in there and you continued to be an acquaintance of his then you would have to know what was going on there.”

Meanwhile, Johanna Sjoberg, one of Epstein’s other alleged victims, was quoted as saying Epstein’s plane made an unplanned stop in Atlantic City between 2001 to 2006. There is no indication they saw Trump, and she said she never gave Trump a massage.

The documents also included emails from an accuser who made allegations against Trump but then withdrew them. (Separately, a woman with the pseudonyms Katie Johnson and Jane Doe accused Trump of raping her in Epstein’s home when she was 13; those filings were dismissed or withdrawn years ago.)

In a statement, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said: “Ted is a total degenerate and loser who continues to beclown himself. He has let Trump Derangement Syndrome rot his brain and, instead of getting the proper care he so desperately needs, has allowed himself to be the laughingstock of all his colleagues, who secretly joke about his glaring short comings.”

Lieu’s office did not comment beyond providing links to articles.

The Pinocchio Test

As we have documented, 17 women have claimed Trump engaged in sexual misconduct. A Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed one woman on our list. But no credible allegation has emerged to connect Trump to any of Epstein’s crimes.

Lieu is a member of Congress who doesn’t need to rely on dubious social media posts for his information — especially if he’s going to make a statement like this. Trump wasn’t mentioned in the latest batch of Epstein documents. He was barely mentioned in the earlier batches. Rest assured — if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been a huge story.

Lieu earns Four Pinocchios.

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For years, Democrats mocked Republicans for their politically craven fealty to former president Donald Trump.

They rolled their eyes when their Republican colleagues claimed they just hadn’t seen the latest tweet. They talked knowingly about how, behind closed doors, many Republicans conceded that, yes, they wished Trump would just disappear — Rumpelstiltskin-style, in a poof of smoke — never to be heard from again.

But now, they’re borrowing a page from the Republican playbook.

Following President Biden’s halting and politically damaging debate performance on June 27, Democratic lawmakers and strategists who regularly lambasted Republicans are offering one, often painfully candid, assessment in private (Biden cannot beat Trump and needs to step aside) and a different, less-than-truthful one in public (Biden had “one bad night,” but he’s up for the job of beating Trump).

They have also begun offering variations of the “I just need to see more of Biden to feel confident in supporting him” excuse — their version of the fail-safe Republican “I didn’t see the tweet” chestnut.

“We’ve spent years shaming Republicans for blindly following Trump off the proverbial cliffs, especially when it meant an electoral disaster for their party, like the cycles of 2018, 2020, and 2022,” said Michael LaRosa, a former Biden White House communications official. “It turns out, we’re just as loyal to the name or leader of our party, as well, even if it invites political risk for everyone in the party running on the ballot.”

In an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday, actor George Clooney, a prominent Democratic donor, also said the quiet part out loud, calling on party leaders “to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw.”

“We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power, and all of the traits that made it so formidable with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to a single person who seeks to hold on to the presidency, and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” Clooney wrote, before urging Democrats to “speak the truth.”

Of course, the situations are hardly analogous. With Trump — who can be bullying, cruel, misogynistic and routinely traffics in racist tropes and falsehoods — issues of character are what have long repelled Republican voters and officials alike.

During the 2016 presidential race, an “Access Hollywood” video emerged of Trump boasting about groping women, and more than a dozen women came forward accusing him of sexual misconduct. Last year, a New York jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and, more recently, another New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He also refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, encouraging his supporters to do the same — a decision that ultimately contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

By contrast, Biden’s only sin in the minds of his supporters right now is aging, and publicly grappling with the indignities and fragility of entering his ninth decade.

“I reject the scale of Biden’s failures compared to Trump’s — it’s just not a comparison,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and ardent Trump critic who works as a writer for the Bulwark website.

But, Miller added, he nonetheless sees similarities between his former party and how Democrats are handling the current moment.

“The gap between private and public as a means of self-protection, of career protection, is very similar — shrouding that careerist unwillingness to say the truth in some fake, high-minded notion that they’re doing the right thing in private,” Miller said.

Even here, Democrats on the whole are being more candid than many Republicans beholden to Trump. So far, 12 House members and one senator have called for Biden to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee, and several other lawmakers from both chambers have gone public with their concerns. On Wednesday, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pointedly told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Biden — who has repeatedly said he has no plans to bow out — needs to make a “decision” on whether he is running for president.

During the Trump years — and even now — the Republicans who dared to publicly utter what many of their colleagues privately whispered could almost be boiled down to a lonely trio: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. (The two House members no longer hold office, and Romney is retiring when his term ends at the end of this year.)

Will Ritter, co-founder of Poolhouse, a center-right ad agency, said that during Trump’s presidency, the constant message from Democrats was “‘brokered convention,’ ‘25th Amendment,’ ‘protecting the party,’ ‘protecting democracy.’”

Now, however, Ritter said, the Democrats “are headed over a cliff,” and the new message has become “one bad night” and “he’s always had a stutter” — a reference to comments from Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, who said Tuesday that Biden has long had a stutter and should not be held to “too high a standard.”

“We’re getting honest talk from George Clooney, and cute word games from almost every elected Democrat,” he said.

Since Biden’s debate debut, the president’s team has also lost credibility with the media — a public rupture that comes after years of Biden aides browbeating reporters for daring to broach the age of the 81-year-old president.

“The other point Republican staffers have just been laughing about is how finally the Biden administration is getting a big dose of what the normal Republican candidate faces in terms of the press,” said Elise Jordan, a former George W. Bush staffer and aide on the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who now considers herself an independent. “It’s just so much harder to deal with, and it’s not going to end, either.”

Biden, too, is exhibiting some characteristics that are shared by Trump and some other politicians. He distrusts negative polls. He has begun lashing out at “elites” and the media. He is now relying heavily on what he personally sees and hears, in situations tailored only to feature his supporters. And he has surrounded himself with a small, insular circle reluctant to bring him bad news.

Jordan said her takeaway from watching Biden’s interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos last Friday was that Biden “was absolutely Trumpish.”

“He was so arrogant and seemed to feel entitled to the office, not that it was an honor to serve, and he didn’t seem to be concerned with democracy, which is allegedly the whole reason for his candidacy,” Jordan said.

In some ways, the about-face from many Democrats may not matter. A key voting bloc this election cycle is the “double hater” voters disillusioned with both major-party options. Nonetheless, many remain driven by negative partisanship — the belief that the other side is so cosmically awful that party tribalism kicks in and they will show up and vote for just about anyone to stop, in the case of Democrats, Trump.

LaRosa, for instance, describes himself as a Biden supporter who has never supported a challenge to Biden or a third-party candidate. But since leaving the White House, he has at times been publicly critical of Democrats and the Biden operation, and noted their strategy “for the last year has been to deny data, undermine or ridicule anyone who questions them, and wage war against the free press.”

“Now, President Biden is left without any goodwill and his message is undercut,” LaRosa said. “You can’t say that Trump is a threat to democracy while you crucify reporters for asking questions, tell us not to believe poll after poll, and manipulate the primary process to crush your political opposition.”

“It’s all,” he added, “sort of Trumpian, to be honest.”