A viral clip shows ABC News anchor and former Democratic Party operative George Stephanopoulos telling a passerby on Tuesday that he doubts President Joe Biden can make it another four-year term.
A stranger approached Stephanopoulos on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Tuesday afternoon and asked him, "Do you think Biden should step down? You've talked to him more than anybody else has lately."
"I don’t think he can serve four more years," Stephanopoulos replied before walking away.
The former Democratic Party operative later apologized for the remark, telling TMZ that he shouldn’t have "responded to a question from a passerby." ABC, meanwhile, clarified in a statement to the outlet, "George expressed his own point of view and not the position of ABC News."
Stephanopoulos on Friday conducted a closely watched interview of the octogenarian president, who dismissed voters’ concerns about his mental acuity and blamed his disastrous debate performance against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on exhaustion that stemmed from "a really bad cold."
Biden, however, delivered a mostly incoherent answer when Stephanopoulos asked him whether he realized in real time that the debate was going badly. "Yeah, look," Biden said. "The whole way I prepared—nobody's fault, mine. Nobody's fault but mine. I prepared what I usually would do, sitting down as I did, come back with foreign leaders, or national security council, for explicit detail."
"And I realized partway through that, you know, I get quoted, the New York Times had me down 10 points before the debate, 9 now, or whatever the hell it is," the octogenarian continued. "The fact of the matter is that what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times, I couldn't—I mean, the way the debate ran—my fault, no one else's fault. No one else's fault."
While 10 House Democrats have demanded Biden’s exit from the presidential race since the debate, Biden in a Monday letter to congressional Democrats said he remains "firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump," urging the lawmakers to rally behind him and "move forward as a unified party."