"The View's" Alyssa Farah Griffin says after watching President Biden's shaky debate against former President Trump, she feels deceived by the White House about his fitness for office.
"I feel duped," she said Friday on the ABC daytime talk show during a discussion about the CNN debate the night before in Atlanta.
"I feel like I've been told this guy's doing gymnastics," Griffin, a former Trump administration official-turned-fierce critic of the 45th president, said of Biden.
White House officials and the president's allies had pushed back on a Wall Street Journal report published earlier this month headlined "Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping," which raised questions about his fitness for office.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in response to the reporting at the time, “As someone who has spent and continues to spend a lot of time with the president and continues to, I think ensure that I am living up to sort of his … strategic approach at every turn, I will say that he is, you know, just one of the strongest leaders that I’ve been able to engage and to be able to work with and to advise."
"This is historically bad, and I think we need to be awake to the stakes of it, because the time is really critical," Griffin said as she reacted to Thursday's debate.
"I was genuinely in shock last night watching this," Griffin told her fellow "The View" co-hosts.
"Even though I had concerns for a couple of years about Biden's age, it was stunningly worse than I expected," she said.
"Donald Trump was a mess, he lied his way through, but Joe Biden's performance was so bad that it eclipsed everything that Donald Trump said because the distraction was on Joe Biden's performance," Griffin said.
"Biden has been running on Donald Trump as a threat to democracy. He's a threat to our values. I agree with him on that. Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy," she said, before joining other prominent voices who have questioned whether Biden should seek a second term following his debate performance.
"We need someone who can beat [Trump.] I've been told for a long time, put... country before party and support Joe Biden's run," Griffin said.
Biden, the CNN commentator continued, "needs to put country before his own ambition, and he needs to step aside and pass the baton, because I'm telling you right now, Trump World is scared when they're hearing rumblings that they're putting someone else on the ticket. They know that any other Democrat, they'll wipe the floor with Donald Trump."
