To hear the legacy media tell it, it’s game “Joe-ver” for the Biden campaign, except for the fact that the 81-year-old president is still alive and maintains that he will not be dropping out of the race.

Many Democratic activists, donors, and media pundits have been salivating at the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris (or anyone else for that matter) taking the reins and rescuing the party from what many think would be an electoral bloodbath in November if President Joe Biden secured the Democratic nomination.

Biden is currently convalescing after contracting COVID-19. Here’s some footage of him not wearing a mask and seemingly struggling to get up a flight of airstairs:

Friday morning, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and tripled down on behalf of the aging and ailing commander-in-chief.

“The president’s in this race,” O’Malley Dillon said, per Fox News. “You’ve heard him say that time and time again, and I think we saw on display last night exactly why, because Donald Trump is not going to offer anything new to the American people. He’s the same person he was in 2020. He’s the same person he was at the debate stage.”

Here’s some of what CNN reported on the bunker mentality of those close to the president and the growing sense of despair overtaking them all:

Multiple leading Democrats tell CNN they feel caught in what one described as a “doom loop,” with every move to keep President Joe Biden in or push him out further destroying their chances against Donald Trump.

It’s breaking the resolve of even staunch allies. It’s feeding bad polls. It’s turning off more donors. It’s sustaining a media atmosphere where no matter what Biden does, he comes off looking like a failure.

And for those who were hoping Biden would quit, the public and private pressure, several top Democrats worry, has been backfiring.

“His last act will not be getting knocked down,” said one longtime Biden 2020 campaign aide of the family and the inner circle. “They won’t allow it.”

Even several Democrats who want Biden to go acknowledge they’ve created a situation where he will never be able to satisfy the “tests” skeptics have said he must pass to stay their nominee. They are buckling down harder, especially when the critiques are more based on vibes, like when Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin suggested in a session between top aides and Senate Democrats last week to “put him in a muscle shirt, like Reagan chopping wood,” according to one person briefed on the discussion.