President Joe Biden on Friday tried to beat back doubts about his fitness following a disjointed debate performance the night before, firing up a crowd of supporters with an energetic speech that accused former President Donald Trump of being a “one-man crime wave”.

Speaking to a boisterous crowd of 2,000 people, Biden, 81, directly confronted questions about his age and insisted that he would never have run for re-election if he didn’t think he was up to the job of being President.

“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said. “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong.”

Delivering his remarks from a Teleprompter, the President appeared to find the energy and clarity that had eluded him in the Atlanta debate.

With the stakes sky high as Democrats around the country openly discussed whether he should abandon his bid for a second term, Biden repeatedly cast the election as a choice between right and wrong, morality and criminality, an honest man and a convicted criminal.

But the President and his supporters knew he needed to rebound quickly from the damage the debate had done to his campaign.

“I know what millions of Americans know,” Biden said. “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”

Biden largely ignored the party anxiety swirling around him. Instead, Biden kicked off what aides described as a messaging blitz aimed at repairing the obvious political damage less than five months from Election Day.

Biden’s best surrogate, former President Barack Obama, weighed in with a social media post aimed at calming Democrats down.

“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” Obama wrote on X, referring to his widely panned first debate in 2012 against Mitt Romney. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

But questions remain. Could that Biden have handled the rigid rules of the debate, which mandated no notes, no teleprompter and no audience for 90 minutes? And even if he had shown up on Thursday night, could he appear day after day for the remaining four months of the campaign?

The Republican answer was no even before Thursday’s debate. That part of Trump’s attacks on Biden is certain to only intensify in the days ahead. And some Democrats who had long worried in private that the answer was no showed that they were more willing to say so publicly, at least for now.

Biden and his wife, Jill, planned to attend a campaign meeting in East Hampton, New York, the Long Island beach town where the real estate firm Zillow prices the median home at $1.9 million. Later was a fundraiser in Red Bank, New Jersey. Biden flashed more vigour in North Carolina and New York, saying he believes with “all my heart and soul” that he can do the job of the presidency.

New York Times News Service