Biden to campaign in swing state Michigan after high-stakes Nato press conference – live updates | US elections 2024

James Clyburn, a South Carolina congressman who is viewed as one of the congressional Democrats most influential with Joe Biden, defended the president in an interview with NBC News today.

However, he also said that the party has until the start of its convention on 19 August to decide if he should be replaced as their presidential nominee, and characterized talk of doing so as unhelpful.

“The conversation should focus on the record of this admin, on the alternative, to this election, and let Joe Biden continue to make his own decisions about his future. He’s earned that right and I’m going to give him that much respect. If he decides to change his mind later on then we will respond to that,” Clyburn said.

“We have until the 19th of August to open our convention and so I would hope that we would spend our time focussing now on the record that we will lay out for the American people, remind the people what is in store for them if Project 2025 were to become the law in any form,” he said, referring to the rightwing blueprint authored by Donald Trump’s for remaking the government.

Should Biden step aside, Clyburn said he was ready to support Kamala Harris as his replacement:

She has acquitted herself well in the job as VP and he wouldn’t have picked her in the first place if he didn’t think she was capable of being president.

He also downplayed Biden’s verbal slip ups, which have attracted even more scrutiny in recent days, saying that they’re a consequences of a stutter he has had since childhood:

He sometimes mangles words and phrases but all of that is almost natural for people who grew up stuttering and they do focus a little more and when you focus a little more you tend to lose the flow … He is still working to overcome this … he has one of the best minds that I have ever been around.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. If Democrats are going to desert Joe Biden en masse, today would be a good day to do it. Last night, the president gave a highly anticipated news conference that many of his allies regarded as his best chance yet to put to rest concerns over his fitness to serve. During the hour-long encounter with reporters, the president impressed many commentators with lengthy but thorough answers regarding foreign policy – but also accidentally said “vice-president Trump”, hours after mistaking introducing “president Putin” when it was, in fact, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy on stage.

The big question now is whether Biden has done enough to restore the party’s trust in him following his weak debate performance against Donald Trump late last month. If the answer is no, today could see a deluge of his allies calling for him to end his bid for re-election, particularly since the Nato summit Biden has hosted in Washington DC over the past few days has concluded. But the press conference may also have convinced his doubters to keep quiet – at least for now. We will hear more from Biden today, as he heads to swing state Michigan to campaign in Detroit in the evening.

Here’s what else is going on:

• Trump, on his Truth Social account, ripped into Biden over slip ups at his press conference, in a likely preview of attack ads to come.

• The Democratic National Committee is putting up Spanish and English billboards attacking Trump for his ties to Project 2025 in major cities in swing states.

• The spotlight will be on the GOP from Monday, when the Republican National Convention kicks off in Milwaukee. The event comes Thursday, when the party formally nominates Trump, while the former president is also expected to at some point make public his pick for running mate.