President Joe Biden should agree to interviews with “serious journalists” as he faces health concerns following a fumbling debate performance that has rocked his re-election effort, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on Tuesday.

Pelosi, an influential member of the Democratic Party, spoke to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell as Biden’s team sought to reassure donors and supporters that the president remains a viable candidate against former President Donald Trump.

“I think my recommendation is for him to have some interviews with serious journalists, you among them. Serious journalists, no-holds-barred, any question is fair, and just sit there and be Joe,” Pelosi suggested.

“Show your values, show your knowledge, show your judgment, show your empathy for the American people,” Pelosi added. “I think that that would be a great thing for him. Not one, maybe two. A couple of those. I think that is essential.”

A couple hours after Pelosi made the comments, ABC News announced that Biden would sit for his “first” post-debate TV interview on Friday. Anchor and former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos is expected to lead the conversation.

Many Democrats are panicking about the upcoming election and there is growing pressure on Biden to drop out, including from donors and at least one member of Congress, and give the party the chance to rally behind an alternative.

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Post-debate polling from CBS News and YouGov found that 41% of Democratic registered voters and 72% of registered voters overall do not believe 81-year-old Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president.

Pelosi, who noted “this is not a normal election,” also said that she thinks it is a “legitimate question” to ask whether Biden’s poor debate performance was “an episode” or a “condition.” She added that Trump should face the same scrutiny.

“It’s going to be up to Joe Biden to do what he thinks is — there’s no more patriotic person in our country than this President of the United States. Nobody less than the former president. Joe Biden — I trust his judgment,” she said later.

Pelosi added, “I think that — again, I’m not a doctor. I can’t say what happens three, four years down the road. But I think that in my experience, which is what you asked me, I think that he will continue to be a great president.”

A senior Biden administration official reportedly said this week that the president is “not a pleasant person to be around” at work and that people are genuinely terrified of him.

The remarks come as President Joe Biden has faced widespread calls to step down following his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump last week.

The senior official told POLITICO that Biden’s staff has to withhold briefing him on specific matters likely to cause him to erupt in anger.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s**tless of him.”

“He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it,” the person added.

The report said that those who are shielding Biden from having the “tough conversations” that need to occur include first lady Jill Biden and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens.

The report comes after veteran investigative journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN on Monday that sources told him Biden’s debate performance on Thursday was part of an ongoing pattern of the president showing signs of cognitive decline.

“They are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off, that there have been 15-20 occasions in the last year and a half, when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” Bernstein said. “And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who, who have witnessed some of them.”

He said that the people he spoke to have worked very closely with Biden for many years and that they “say that in the last six months particularly, there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.”

One specific example he mentioned happened last year at a Four Seasons hotel where Biden spoke at a fundraiser.

“He started at the podium and then he became very stiff, according to the people there as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis,” he said. “And he became very stiff and a chair had to be brought for him to do the latter part of the event.”

At the end of the segment, Bernstein seemed to imply that the White House’s physician report on Biden’s health was dishonest and that information was being concealed.

“I mean, obviously, it’d be great if we could have real doctor’s reports from both candidates,” he said. “Well, that’s not gonna happen.”