By The campaign of President Joe Biden on Thursday condemned a new ad from a Donald Trump-aligned political action committee that suggests the president might die if he is re-elected.
The 18-second ad from MAGA Inc., which is being run nationally before Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night, features video footage of the president stammering while speaking, and then stumbling while walking onto a stage and then up a stairway to Air Force One.
“We can all see Joe Biden’s weakness,” a narrator says while ominous music plays over the video.
“If Biden wins, can he even survive till 2029?” the narrator asks.
As that question is posed, a split-screen shows a video of Vice President Kamala Harris laughing and smiling at an event as Biden struggles to pick himself up from the stairs in another video.
Harris, due to her constitutional office, would become president if Biden were to die.
Biden, 81, is the oldest person ever elected president. If the Democrat is re-elected this fall, his term will end in January 2029, when he will be 86 years old.
A Biden campaign spokesperson, in a statement to NBC News, said of the MAGA Inc. ad: “This is a sick and deranged stunt from a broke and struggling campaign that can’t defend Trump’s extreme Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion, separate families, raise costs on the middle class, repeal health care, and sow chaos and division.”
“Trump tried this strategy four years ago and got his ass kicked by Joe Biden,” said the spokesperson, Ammar Moussa.
“He should tune in tonight alongside tens of millions of Americans to see why President Biden will beat him again this November,” Moussa said.
Taylor Budowich, who is the head of MAGA PAC, fired back on that.
“Joe Biden is going to try to convince America not believe their lyin’ eyes,” Budowich tweeted. “The reality is America is suffering, Joe Biden is weak, and we can’t survive four more years.”
Trump, the Republican former president who is on track to face Biden in the election, has repeatedly suggested that Biden is not mentally strong enough to remain in office, despite Trump making a series of verbal gaffes that critics have seized on to question his mental competency.
A Department of Justice special counsel’s report last month found that Biden had “willfully” retained classified materials after he ended his tenure as vice president under former President Barack Obama.
But special counsel Robert Hur said he would not prosecute Biden because, among other things, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden and his lawyers have condemned that characterization of the president and pointed to details in Hur’s report that undercut the special counsel’s claim that Biden had willfully kept classified records.
White House Dr. Kevin O’Connor last month said Biden is “fit for duty” after undergoing a routine physical examination.
White House press secretary spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre on the heels of that exam said that the president’s doctor and a neurologist had said he did not need a cognitive test, NBC News reported at the time.
Biden “passes a cognitive test every day,” Jean-Pierre told reporters, saying he “moves from one topic to another topic, understanding the granular level of these topics.”
