NEW YORK — All sounds fine in President Joe Biden’s world. That devastating debate? Just a bad night. Those dismal poll numbers? Simply inaccurate. The gloomy election predictions? The same old doomsayers, wrong again. The Democrats who want him to drop out? No one has told him that.

For Biden, the crisis seen by so many Democrats who are not on his payroll — and by some who are — is nothing more than another bump in the road, another obstacle to overcome as he always has. He does not agree that he is slipping as he ages. He does not accept that he is losing to former President Donald Trump. He does not believe much of his own party wants him to step aside.

His prime-time interview that aired Friday night on ABC News was an exercise not just in damage control but in reality control. For much of his long and storied political career, Biden has succeeded through sheer force of will, defying the doubters and the skeptics and the scorners to prove that he could do what no one expected. Yet now, in what may be the most threatened moment of his presidency, that self-confidence leaves him increasingly isolated in his own party.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama who has long expressed worry about Biden’s decision to run again, said the president was rightfully proud of his record. “But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race,” he wrote on social media.

Biden’s performance in the 22-minute session with George Stephanopoulos was not viewed as disastrously as his debate against Trump eight days earlier. But while his most loyal supporters presumably found enough reassurance to stick with him, those who have turned against him or were on the verge of doing so did not seem comforted, and time is running out if the party is to change nominees, as some would like.

While Biden had a ruddier color to his face this time and looked calm and composed with his hands in his lap and legs crossed, he once again sounded hoarse and at times tentative, sometimes struggling to finish a sentence. He was dismissive about concerns about his health, denied that he was more frail and ducked questions about medical tests.

He took responsibility for his debate performance repeatedly — “nobody’s fault but mine” — but then blamed it on exhaustion and sickness and Trump “shouting” and distracting him. He said that he has a cognitive test every day because he is “running the world” and that he would only step aside as a candidate “if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race.’ ”

Probably the one line that generated the most irritation among fellow Democrats was his response when Stephanopoulos asked Biden how he would feel in January if he loses to Trump and has to turn the White House back over to the former president. “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,” Biden replied.

Multiple Democrats expressed exasperation at that afterward, declaring that the election was not about earning a participation trophy but about stopping a convicted felon who tried to overturn an election he had lost, urged “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to power and vowed to devote his next term to exacting “retribution” on his adversaries.

At one point, Stephanopoulos even seemed to offer Biden a dignified way out, only to have the president reject it.

“The prevailing sentiment is this,” Stephanopoulos said of Democrats. “They love you, and they will be forever grateful to you for defeating Donald Trump in 2020. They think you’ve done a great job as president, a lot of the successes you outlined. But they are worried about you and the country. And they don’t think you can win. They want you to go with grace, and they will cheer you if you do. What do you say to that?”

“I say the vast majority are not where that — those folks are,” Biden replied, ignoring polls showing roughly half of Democrats think he should withdraw. “I don’t doubt there are some folks there.”

Biden now heads into a week when fellow Democrats will be deciding what to do next.

Some Democratic lawmakers and major donors are organizing efforts to pressure the president into leaving the race or rethinking his approach. The president’s time on television Friday does not seem likely to head that off.

“I can’t imagine it will do much, if anything, to calm the nerves of Democrats on Capitol Hill,” said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Democrats. “We are in for a rough couple of days.”