"I don't think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me," President Joe Biden told ABC host George Stephanopoulos last night in his first television appearance since his dismal performance in the CNN Presidential Debate.
"I had a bad night," President Biden told ABC, dismissing the halting and fumbling debate as a one-off, blaming exhaustion and a "really bad cold".
But the prime time interview - which will air in full tomorrow - came at the end of a bad week for Biden as calls for his resignation in his own party grew louder.
His rival, meanwhile, seemed to be having a good week.
Mobile phone footage of former President Donald Trump in the driving seat of a golf cart emerged.
In the expletive-laden exchange with unknown onlookers, the former president called Joe Biden a "broken down pile of crap," whom he bragged he had knocked out of the race, referencing calls for the president to quit.
"That means we have Kamala," the former president went on, as he appeared to stuff cash into his pocket and pull on his golf gloves.
"She’s so bad, she’s so pathetic," he said.
In an historic ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court granted presidents "absolute immunity" from prosecution over official acts in office.
The very next day, the judge in New York’s criminal case - in which he was convicted for covering up hush payments to a porn star - agreed to delay sentencing, while he considered the implications of the Supreme Court ruling.
The judge was due to hand down the sentence on 11 July, just days before the Republican National Convention, where the party is expected to officially nominate Trump as its candidate.
Now it won’t happen until September - if indeed it happens at all.
President Joe Biden vowed to fight on, as the clamour for him to quit the race intensified.
On Tuesday, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, became the first sitting congressman to call for the president to go.
The next day, Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona did the same.
A few others followed as the week wore on, but it was a trickle, rather than a flood, of elected representatives.
But soon, major donors, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, joined the public calls for his resignation.
"Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous," Mr Hastings told The New York Times.
Abigail Disney, heir to the Disney family fortune and a long-time donor to the Democrats, announced she would suspend donations until Biden dropped out of the race for the White House.
She said she made the decision out of "realism, not disrespect".
"If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I’m absolutely certain," she said.
While senior political allies continued to stick with President Biden, they agreed voters had a right to ask about the president’s fitness for office.
"I think it's a legitimate question to say, is this an episode, or is this a condition?" the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC.
"And so, when people ask that question, it's completely legitimate - of both candidates," she added.
"He understands that it is fair for people to ask that question," the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters but was "absolutely not" considering stepping down.
In the same news conference, Ms Jean-Pierre fielded questions about the president’s need for sleep, after it emerged his debate prep team had scheduled an afternoon nap every day.
Previously, the president’s team had blamed jetlag for hampering his performance on the debate stage. But the White House spokesperson rebuffed a direct question on whether the president needed a daily nap.
That night, the president met 20 Democrat governors. Biden told the meeting that his doctor had declared him to be in "good health," but appeared to admit he was tired.
In reported comments, the president told his guests that he was going to stop scheduling events after 8pm so that he could get enough sleep.
But afterwards, several of the governors rushed to show their support.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz declared Biden "fit for office".
"None of us are denying Thursday night was a bad performance," he said.
"It was a bad hit, if you will on that, but it doesn’t impact what I believe - he’s delivering," Mr Walz added.
Despite the White House’s insistence that the president would be staying on, speculation continued to swirl around who might replace him.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll showing Michelle Obama as the only hypothetical Democratic candidate who would beat Trump won’t have done much for spirits over at Democratic headquarters. The former first lady has repeatedly rejected calls for her to run.
Other candidates on the list - Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker - would lose to Trump, according to the poll of registered voters.
Asked whether Biden should drop out, nearly three in five polled said he should.
"I screwed up," Biden told a Milwaukee, Wisconsin radio station.
"I didn't have a good debate," the president went on.
"That’s 90 minutes on stage, look at what I’ve done in 3.5 years, I led the economy back from the brink of collapse," he said.
As the week came to a close, President Biden made it clear he was going nowhere.
If the Lord Almighty came down and said: "Joe get outta the race," I’d get outta the race," he told George Stephanopoulos.
"The Lord Almighty’s not comin’ down," he said.
