When President Biden was in office, aides often surrounded him as he walked to Marine One to hide his stiff gait, as reported by Axios. Biden eventually started wearing sneakers to avoid tripping and taking shorter stairs up Air Force One.
At the beginning of his final year in office, President Biden made 148 mistakes while speaking over the span of four months. A special counsel report revealed that over the course of a five-hour interview, Biden had forgotten when he was vice president and the date of his late son’s death.
The stories around his decline created pressure for Biden well before the Democratic Party forced him out of the presidential race. But, as new information is showing us, they weren’t the full picture.
With Biden out of office, his former staffers are coming forward, both in the news and in books, to reveal how much worse the president was than what was being reported at the time.
Here is what the tell-alls have revealed so far:
Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen report in their new book that Biden’s allies were prepping for the then-80-year-old’s death as early as 2023. With a full year until the next presidential election, allies close to the president began to prepare for the possibility that another candidate would need to take Biden’s place in the presidential race, whether due to Biden dropping out or passing away.
One aide to then-Vice President Kamala Harris even carried around a list of Republican federal judges that Trump hadn’t appointed in the event they unexpectedly needed to swear Harris into office, Parnes and Allen wrote.
“If Harris needed to be sworn in on short notice, it could be from someone seen as more credible to Republicans,” reads an excerpt of the book, first given to The Hill.
In Chris Whipple’s new book, “Uncharted,” a top Biden aide finally admitted that the 82-year-old was worse behind closed doors than he was in public as he failed to grasp back-and-forths in practice sessions leading up to the first presidential debate.
Top Biden aide Ron Klain, who helped the former president with debate prep, told Whipple in his book that he “half-seriously” wondered if Biden believed he was the president of NATO rather than the president of the United States as they prepared for the first presidential debate.
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” the excerpt reads. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” Whipple recounts, “[Klain] was startled. He’d never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” Biden fell asleep by the pool after leaving the prep, according to The Guardian. (Klain later told the New York Post that he never doubted the president’s mental acuity.)
Biden insiders aren’t just telling all in book deals; they are talking to the media about what they saw behind closed doors.
The longtime press secretary for former First Lady Jill Biden, Michael LaRosa, sat down with Puck reporter Tara Palmeri in February to detail his experience with the 82-year-old president.
While discussing the White House’s efforts to conceal Biden’s decline, LaRosa admitted that he and other staff members “gaslit” members of the public about the former president’s fitness in office.
“There are some things that are true, I mean, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling,” LaRosa told Palmeri.
“And I will use the term gaslighting because that’s what they were doing, the campaign, former colleagues,” he continued.
LaRosa also explained that the former president’s team was “scared to death” to let him participate in off-the-cuff press conferences or media appearances.
“They just couldn’t do it. They didn’t have any idea. And they didn’t have the vessel either in Biden, by the way, who would have done anything. He loves TV. He loves doing stuff. It was the orbit that did not trust their own candidate,” LaRosa added.
A colleague of mine in the White House press corps once remarked to me that many of the other reporters covering President Biden knew of the scandals happening around the West Wing, whether it be the battle between former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and National Security Spokesperson John Kirby or the 82-year-old’s physical state. They just chose to turn a blind eye to it.
When special counsel Robert Hur revealed just how bad Biden’s state had become, the press corps showed little interest or desire to find out any more information about the president’s state. The media repeatedly downplayed concerns about the President’s fitness as GOP talking points. In the months before Biden’s disastrous debate, videos of the president looking lost or wandering off from a group picture were spun by the administration and the media as “cheap fakes.” Months later, when Biden took the debate stage, it was clear there was a lot that Democrats and the media hadn’t questioned or revealed.
Only a year after the debate, are we finally beginning to learn from the people who had access to him just how bad Biden’s condition was.
More books and exposés are set to come out in the coming weeks detailing President Biden’s declining state while in office. It wasn’t when the president’s condition seemingly caused threats to national security, as Axios reported that aides had said Biden was “dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. but susceptible to “verbal miscues” and fatigue outside that time frame. Or when Biden told governors after the debate that he would stop holding events after 8 PM and get more sleep to prevent more gaffes. Rather than reporting these details when Biden was still in office, a move that would have impacted the election and the Democratic party, it’s likely the mainstream media covered up the stories until they couldn’t cause political damage.