The tip-off was petty and it was savvy. And it signaled how President Joe Biden was going to fight for his political life.

On Friday night, Biden was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about a recent report that Virginia senator Mark Warner was rounding up colleagues to push for Biden to quit the presidential race. Until that point, Biden’s answers had been at most competent and occasionally desultory. But the question sparked a half-smile and a quick, cutting response. “Well, Mark is a good man,” Biden began, before inserting the knife. “He also tried to get the nomination too.” It was a reference to some ancient political history: Warner raised money for a prospective 2008 presidential bid but didn’t run. In other words, Biden threw a clear brushback pitch: Warner didn’t have the guts to run and maybe lose, and run again. I did. And now I’m president and he’s not.

Biden, at 81, has lost physical and cognitive steps. But he and his team are still well-versed in how power works in Washington and know which buttons to push. So on Monday, as Congress came back to town, Biden went on MSNBC and goaded any Democrats who thought he should quit to challenge him at the Democratic convention in August, knowing that the most prominent elected officials would be too risk-averse to stick their necks out and own the responsibility for toppling the president and potentially losing to Donald Trump in November. Not long after, Warner backed off; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and others expressed their support; and by the end of the first day of a crucial week, Biden’s team believed it had rounded, if not completely turned, a corner in his effort to cling to the nomination.

The next six days present Biden with a series of checkpoints on the road to survival: keep key Democrats—particularly Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries—from turning against Biden; coherently navigate a Thursday press conference; and shift the spotlight to Trump with the Republican national convention next week. If it clears these hurdles, the campaign is counting on the anti-Biden fever within the Democratic Party to break as the clock ticks down toward Election Day, making it logistically impossible to stage a mini-primary or smoothly swap in Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bidenworld also seems to think that, absent any damning new medical information or major public lapses, the press may grow bored of reporting every word Biden mangles—and eventually discount his verbal flubs as just part of who the president is, parallel to how Trump’s ramblings are covered. This seems like wishful thinking. Several mainstream news outlets appear bent on proving that Biden’s White House aides have been hiding the true state of his health for the past three years, or that the president is suffering from Parkinson’s.

Biden has put himself in this precarious position. But helping fuel the frenzy among the media and political class is a long-running condescension toward him. Yes, Biden has spent 50 years in DC, and in some ways is the ultimate insider. But culturally, he’s always been a Beltway outsider: Scranton Joe, who went to a middlebrow college and graduated near the bottom of his law school class, a striver who talked too much and really needed his government paycheck, never one of the “This Town” cool kids. Combine that with fear of Trump and the ingrained Democratic tendency to panic, and the result is a backlash that has been swift and harsh.

Biden, of course, has long been aware of the disdain. So he’s using it as part of his counterattack strategy, by drawing a contrast between his “grassroots” support and the “elites” attempting to drive him from the race. The so-called elites, and especially the media, make convenient foils, but Biden has something of a point. His polling numbers against Trump have worsened post-debate, but they haven’t collapsed, while some big-money Democratic donors seem to be competing to devise a scheme that will force Biden to withdraw and editorial board writers implore him to step aside.

So far, Biden has been able to exploit the splintered nature of Democratic opposition, and the self-interests of his former Capitol Hill colleagues. Skepticism about his prospects remains widespread, though. “His emphatic denials about exiting don’t mean what people think,” a Democratic strategist involved in a key Senate race says. “If he shows a little hesitation, it’s done, so to play out the Hail Mary downs, he has to keep the charade going. I give him seven days.”

If Biden makes it out of July atop the ticket, perhaps fear of Trump can be amplified enough to motivate Biden’s base as November closes in. It would still leave Biden with the serious problem of turning out enough independent, disaffected, and young voters—the people most likely to be troubled by Biden’s advanced age. Even a year ago, long before the debate debacle, a top Democratic strategist was pointing to Biden’s age as the best explanation for the disconnect between the country’s economic progress and the president’s dismal job approval ratings. “I think it’s ageism,” the strategist told me. “And I hate saying that. But he’s not getting the benefit of the doubt simply because they see him as an old, feeble man.” Overcoming that image of fragility has lately become exponentially harder; Biden’s sentences dissolve into fragments even when he’s calling into the friendly confines of Morning Joe.

Before the debate, Biden had seemed fated—even with all his first-term accomplishments, and even if he pulled off a second presidential campaign win—to be remembered as a solid supporting actor to more compelling leading men, Barack Obama and Trump. Now, though, he is risking a large, unhappy legacy. “If he continues running and loses, everything will be seen as his fault,” a second Democratic strategist says. “Every Senate seat lost, every House seat lost, every right that Trump takes away. You own everything.”