Former US President Barack Obama is telling Democrats that incumbent Joe Biden has no chance of being reelected after his recent debate against GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, American conservative journalist Tucker Carlson has claimed. According to Carlson, Obama’s recent public endorsement of Biden was not sincere.
Biden and Trump faced off in an open debate on Thursday night, with the president’s performance widely seen as “incoherent” and “fumbling,” underscoring concerns about his age. Following the showdown, many Democrats and their donors reportedly scrambled to find a replacement for Biden as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
Publicly, however, many Democratic heavyweights, including Obama, reaffirmed their support for Biden. While admitting that “bad debate nights happen,” the former president insisted that “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
Writing on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, Carlson said, citing an “unusually good source,” that Obama’s post had been “disingenuous.”
“In private, Obama is telling people Biden can’t win, and he is therefore in favor of an open convention,” the journalist claimed. He added Obama is not saying whom he supports, but recently met with Biden in person to deliver the message.
Carlson also claimed that relations between Obama and Biden – who served as vice president between 2009 and 2017 – have never been warm, and were at times even “hostile.” According to the journalist, those ties “recently… deteriorated further,” mostly due to First Lady Jill Biden, who allegedly “kept her husband cloistered away from anyone who might convince him to drop out” of the race for the White House after the disastrous debate.
Carlson added that Biden’s wife remains “the driving force behind her husband’s reelection campaign,” echoing a recent NBC report naming her as the only person who could convince the president to “change course.”
However, CNN reported on Monday that Biden’s family, including Jill, had urged him not to end his campaign, blaming his poor performance on his team.
While the Biden-Obama relationship has often been described as a “bromance” to the point of becoming meme material, numerous media reports indicated that things have been much more complicated. An Axios report in March suggested that Biden “often measures himself” against his predecessor, with a rivalry dynamic present in their relations. According to Politico, Obama also shared serious concerns about Biden’s ability to win the 2020 election.