RALEIGH, N.C. — President Joe Biden on Friday tried to beat back doubts about his fitness following a disjointed debate performance the night before, firing up a crowd of supporters with an energetic speech that accused former President Donald Trump of being a “one-man crime wave.”

Biden Confronted Questions About His Age

Speaking to a boisterous crowd of 2,000 people, Biden, 81, directly confronted questions about his age and insisted that he would never have run for reelection if he didn’t think he was up to the job of being president.

“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said, setting off roars of approval in the fairgrounds hangar and chants of “Joe! Joe!” from the crowd. “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong.”

Delivering his remarks from a Teleprompter, and freed from rules that required him to hold his own, without notes, for 90 minutes, the president appeared to find the energy and clarity that had eluded him in the Atlanta debate.

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Stakes are Sky High

With the stakes sky high as Democrats around the country openly discussed whether he should abandon his bid for a second term, Biden repeatedly cast the election as a choice between right and wrong, morality and criminality, an honest man and a convicted criminal.

But the event, planned before the debate, also conveyed a sense of political desperation. The president and his supporters knew he needed to rebound quickly from the damage the debate had done to his campaign. Biden vowed to do what he has done in the face of decades of personal and political crises.

“I know what millions of Americans know,” he said, raising his voice and clenching his fist. “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”

Biden largely ignored the party anxiety swirling around him and did not mention the calls by some high-profile Democrats that he consider stepping aside — the kind of breach that is almost unheard-of this close to a major party’s nominating convention.

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Biden Has Messaging Blitz to Repair Damage

Instead, Biden kicked off what aides described as a messaging blitz aimed at repairing the obvious political damage less than five months from Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris had a rally planned in Las Vegas, and a flurry of campaign surrogates were sent to the closest television cameras available armed with talking points about Trump.

By the early afternoon, Biden’s best surrogate, former President Barack Obama, had weighed in with a social media post aimed at calming Democrats down.

“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” Obama wrote on X, referring to his widely panned first debate in 2012 against Mitt Romney. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit.”

The campaign event Friday was unlike most of Biden’s recent stops on the trail. His supporters waved signs and cheered “Let’s go, Joe,” as local politicians rallied the crowd, asking those present to “get noisy” for rappers E40 and Fat Joe.

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