Amid growing calls for his exit, president told ABC only ‘the Lord almighty’ could make him exit 2024 race

• Full story: Biden says only ‘Lord almighty’ could make him drop out

History may record them as eight days that sunk a presidency, or at least the rockiest road to a convention in living memory – a week that has left Joe Biden ’s re-election bid hanging by a thread.

Here’s a timeline:

Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump. The media is once again repeating the mistakes of 2016

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose, and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

With democracy at a moment of maximum peril, millions were pinning their hopes on the Democratic party as a last wall of defence – but the debate changed that

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” So wrote supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor in a minority opinion this week. She was far from alone in the view that, with Donald Trump threatening an “ imperial presidency ”, American democracy is at a moment of maximum peril.

Millions are pinning their hopes on the Democratic party as the last wall of defence. Surely, they believed, Democrats would field their best and brightest led by a dynamic presidential candidate and demagogue slayer. Instead the party is offering 81-year-old Joe Biden and an internal civil war.

The presumptive Republican nominee has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want – and more

“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.

After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good . His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It , is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

In appearance aimed at quelling nascent rebellion among Democrats, Biden made no big gaffes, but reviews are mixed

Joe Biden has insisted that only “the Lord almighty” could persuade him to exit the US presidential race in a potential make-or-break TV interview aimed at quelling a burgeoning rebellion in the Democratic party.

In an exchange free from major gaffes but unlikely to appease his critics, Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News how he would feel if he were to remain the nominee and lose to Donald Trump. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” the president replied.

Signs were hiding in plain sight well before the US presidential debate against Donald Trump

Warning signs of Joe Biden’s decline were hiding in plain sight well before last month’s calamitous US presidential debate performance against Donald Trump.

But Biden had the perfect cover: a long history of verbal slips and other blunders that made it hard to blame his age alone. “I am a gaffe machine,” he admitted in December 2018 when asked about potential liabilities of his election campaign.

President tells audience ‘I wasn’t too old to create over 50m new jobs’ as worries mount following debate performance

• US politics live – latest updates

Joe Biden had a clear message at his Wisconsin rally on Friday: he isn’t going anywhere.

“There’s been a lot of speculation – what’s Joe going to do?” said Biden. “Here’s my answer: I am running and am gonna win again.”

US president expected to sit for first TV interview since debate debacle, followed by an ‘aggressive travel schedule’ spanning multiple swing states

Joe Biden has had another slip-up in which he accidentally said that he is the “first Black woman” to serve as vice-president “with a Black president ”.

During an interview on Thursday with Philadelphia’s WURD radio station, Biden defended his competency following his poor debate performance last week.

The president met with Democratic governors to shore up support, but doubts regarding his competence remain

Joe Biden has reportedly admitted to Democratic governors that he needs more sleep – while telling a supporter at the White House Fourth of July celebrations on Thursday night that he isn’t “going anywhere” in the race for re-election.

The US president told the Democratic governors that he had been feeling fatigued, needed to get more sleep and was aiming to reduce overwork, particularly by planning fewer engagements after 8pm, the New York Times reported .