Biden’s closest aides hold secret talks about how to convince the president to step aside

A small group of President Joe Biden’s closest aides and confidantes have begun to huddle for closely-held discussions on how best to convince him to bow out of the 2024 presidential election.

“He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign official told NBC News, offering a blunt assessment of his re-election chances. “He will never recover from this.”

The select cadre of Biden advisers — some from the president’s campaign and some from within his White House staff — have been brainstorming how best to pitch the famously stubborn 81-year-old president on passing the torch to another candidate who would run against Donald Trump in the November general election. If Biden dropped out, he’d be the first American president not to seek a second term since Lyndon Johnson bowed out of the 1968 presidential race amid the tumult of the Vietnam War.

Some have begun to recognize the gravity of Biden’s situation as polls have shown his support faltering as donations to his campaign have slowed since his disastrous debate on June 27 that caused panic within the Democratic party. Since then, Biden has faced public calls from a dozen lawmakers to ditch his re-election bid, a number that’s reportedly set to grow following this weeks’ NATO summit.

A person close to the Biden campaign told The Independent there is a growing realization within the re-election brain trust that Biden currently has no path to defeat Trump, while a second official who spoke to NBC said “no one involved in the effort” believes he can win.

The existence of the discussions, which were first reported by The New York Times, were confirmed by a person familiar with them to The Independent.

But a Biden campaign spokesperson, senior adviser TJ Ducklo, flatly denied any