Biden campaign gaslight public about age worries

Post Reply New Topic

A former White House aide said President Joe Biden's presidential campaign was "gaslighting" the American public on concerns about his age.

Why It Matters
Concerns about Biden's age became a major issue in the 2024 presidential race that many feel haunted Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ballot, through November. Those concerns came to a head during Biden's debate against now-President Donald Trump in June, when Biden sounded hoarse and appeared to stumble through several answers.

Despite growing concerns from Democrats and worsening poll numbers, Biden declined to withdraw from the race for nearly a month.

Democrats, for months, have been debating the reasons for their defeats. While many point to ideological or policy reasons, others say the debacle cost the party trust among voters and was a key factor in why Harris could not win back voters against Trump.

What To Know
Michael LaRosa, who served as former first lady Jill Biden's press secretary, slammed the party's approach to handling concerns about the former president's age during a Wednesday panel discussion at American University's Sine Institute of Policy and Politics.

"I will use the term 'gaslight' because that's what they were doing, the campaign, former colleagues," he said. "The message to everybody was to make sure that you tell people 'It's too early. It's too early. These polls don't mean anything."

By denying the data that was out there publicly. By denying the really insightful journalism that, they were actually demeaning a lot of the people. It was the data denial that really bothered me," he said.

He said it became clear to him quickly that Biden planned to run for reelection, despite many believing he would pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.

"Ultimately, the problem with deciding to run for reelection again was a misread of our mandate," he said.

What People Are Saying
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, during a Institute of Politics at Harvard University discussion on Wednesday: "It was a firing squad, and I had never seen anything like it before. I had never seen a part do that in a way that they did. It was hurtful and sad to see that happen. A firing squad around a person who I believe was a true patriot."

Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod, on CNN in January: "When you're that old in a job this hard, it's doubtful that one can go full steam for another four years. That was a concern that [Biden] blew through when he decided to run."

A CNN anchor Jake Tapper is facing blowback for co-authoring a new book about efforts to allegedly cover up former President Joe Biden's mental decline.

Penguin Press announced Wednesday that Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson were co-writing a book about what led to the Democratic Party's 2024 election defeat, with a focus on Biden's "serious decline."

In response, several conservatives have resurfaced old remarks in which Tapper defended Biden in the 2020 election cycle. After President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, criticized Biden's voice for shaking in his campaign speeches, Tapper wrote on Twitter that politics aside, it is "worth reading this remarkable piece about his stutter" with a link to an Atlantic article describing how Biden's stutter began in boyhood.

What To Know
Despite Tapper's previous defense of Biden, he was among one of the most vocal critics of the president's decision to seek reelection in the wake of the June 27 presidential debate. Tapper was the co-moderator of the only debate that took place between Biden and Trump last year.

Twelve days before Biden dropped out, Tapper took direct aim at the president and his team, calling Biden and his family in "complete denial" about his health and the state of his campaign

In a lengthy monologue, Tapper criticized "Democratic elites" for being "late to acknowledge" the age and ability concerns that the public has long had about Biden. At one point, the CNN anchor played a clip of Biden giving an interview to a Philadelphia-based radio station before responding to the president's gaffe about being proud to be the first Black woman to serve as vice president and calling it "not coherent."

Tapper also questioned Biden about his age in a 2022 interview, asked voters about the mental sharpness of Biden and Trump in a 2023 segment, asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in 2023 about Biden being too old and pressed Biden's former White House communications director, Kate Bedingfield, in 2024 about the alleged memory lapses the president had while being interviewed by the Justice Department.

When Biden skipped the presidential Super Bowl interview in February 2024, in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur's report calling Biden an "elderly man with poor memory," Tapper asked Democratic Representative Robert Garcia of California what Biden was "afraid of."

What People Are Saying
Jim Verdi, a producer for the popular conservative show The Don Bongino Radio Show wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday: "Is there an entire chapter devoted to your role in the coverup?"

Stephen L. Miller, the conservative host of Versus Media Podcast, tweeted: "Is it just 300 pages of you guys apologizing to the rest of us you labeled cheap fake artists or are you really trying this?"

Joe Dan Gorman, a conservative commentator, replied to Tapper: "You had a ringside seat for the entire ride... and said nothing."

CNN anchor Jake Tapper, in a statement announcing his new book:”Toni Morrison once said 'If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.' That's what inspired this book: we wanted to know more about what we all just lived through. More than 200 interviews later, Alex and I have a much better idea. And soon you all will too."

Penguin Press, the publisher of Tapper's upcoming book, in a press release: "What you will learn makes President Biden's decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents."

What Happens Next
Tapper's upcoming book, titled Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, is set to be released on May 20

Biden? Who cares about someone who ultimately wasn't even on the ballot on Election Day LAST YEAR?

Meanwhile, the even more addled candidate, who was on the ballot, is now destroying the country and will cause even more deaths than he did last time when he refused to help during the original Covid epidemic. Including deaths of autistic people.

THIS is gaslighting. Stop pretending that both sides are equally bad.

Stop pretending that both sides are equally bad.

Democrats have long needed an honest reckoning with Joe Biden’s failed presidency, which ended with his humiliating decision to abandon his reelection bid at nearly the last possible moment in July 2024—which in turn led to a hobbled campaign by Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump’s return to the White House. A disaster on that scale calls for at least some self-reflection. When dealing with a collective entity such as a political party, the minimum demand should be a thoroughgoing autopsy.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats have largely avoided even cursory introspection. The sheer awfulness of Donald Trump is one factor for the lack of internal critique,—or more accurately, a convenient easy excuse. The forthcoming publication on May 20 of the book Original Sin by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is igniting the debate that many Democratic insiders have been trying to tamp down. The book documents Joe Biden’s deteriorating cognitive capacity and health during his presidency and alleges a cover-up by Biden’s inner circle.

Speaking on Tuesday to reporters about whether Biden should even have sought reelection given public perception about his aging, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg said, “We’re also not in a position to wallow in hindsight. We’ve got to get ready for some fundamental tests for the future of the country and this party.”

Given the necessity of fighting Trump, there’s a temptation to say that the party doesn’t have time for potentially divisive internal wrangling. But there is a more self-interested reason for wanting not to “wallow in hindsight.” As Tapper and Thompson document, all too many high officials and political strategists, many of whom are still guiding the party, were implicated in Biden’s scandalous coverup. Writing in The Nation Norman Solomon rightly decried the pervasive “careerism” that implicated all wings of the party, centrists and progressives alike.

The problem with Buttigieg’s refusal to “wallow in hindsight” is that for many voters the failure of the Biden presidency isn’t something that can easily be relegated to the past but remains a reason to distrust the Democratic Party. In particular, the allegation of a cover-up casts a long shadow. A poll conducted by NBC in March showed Democrats were at a historical low point in public esteem, with only 27 percent of Americans having a favorable opinion of the party. In contrast to Buttigieg’s head-in-the-sand attitude, Representative Ro Khanna was more realistic when he posted on Wednesday, “To rebuild trust, Democrats must be honest. In light of the facts that have come out, Joe Biden should not have run for re-election, and we should have had an open primary.”

In an excerpt of their book in The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson paint a dire picture of Biden’s incapacity as president:


“The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.”


But the Biden scandal goes beyond his catastrophic decision to run again in 2024. Reviewing Original Sin in The Washington Post, Alex Shepherd of The New Republic notes:


“there is evidence that Biden’s cognitive decline began all the way back in 2015, after the death of his son Beau, and that he required extensive help to conduct straightforward interviews during the 2020 election (he was often helped by being able to use a teleprompter, since so much of campaigning was done remotely during the Covid pandemic). The most troubling suggestion in Tapper and Thompson’s book is that Biden’s real original sin wasn’t running for re-election—it was running for the presidency in the first place.”

If Biden’s decision to run in 2020 was a mistake, the scandal of his presidency encompasses a much wider group of leaders. After all, Biden was faltering in the early primaries when, in a bid to stop Bernie Sanders’s surging campaign, establishment leaders coalesced around Biden as the candidate with the best chance to prevent the left from gaining the nomination. This led to Representative James Clyburn’s pivotal endorsement of Biden before the South Carolina primary, as well as the decision by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out of the race in favor of Biden. Behind the scenes, former president Barack Obama reportedly herded party support in Biden’s direction.

Biden was always a lackluster campaigner. It took the party elite to win him the nomination. His victory in the subsequent general election was also aided by outside factors, notably the Covid disaster (which allowed Biden to do the kind of remote campaigning he preferred) and Trump’s historic unpopularity. If Biden won the 2020 nomination because of the party elite, then his failures belong not just to him alone—or to his inner circle.

After his 2020 victory, Biden’s cognitive decline intersected with his more unpleasant personal traits. The fact that he required the assistance of the party elite to win the nomination did not make Biden a more humble man. Quite the reverse. Biden seems to have seen his victory as a personal vindication against the doubters he thought always underestimated him.

A stubborn and arrogant unwillingness to listen to critics characterized Biden’s presidency. On foreign policy, he refused to budge from his bear-hug strategy of embracing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden’s mental blinkers were so strong he was incapable of even seeing conflicting evidence. NBC News reported a telling detail in an account of a private meeting Biden had in April 2024 with Arab and Muslim Americans: “A doctor who attended was taken aback when she showed Biden prints of photos of malnourished children and women in Gaza—to which Biden responded that he had seen those images before. The problem, the doctor said, was that she had printed the photos from her own iPhone.”

Writing in The American Prospect, veteran political strategist Stan Greenberg offered a compelling account of how Biden’s arrogance sabotaged Kamala Harris’s campaign. Greenberg notes that prior to dropping out Biden didn’t want to acknowledge persistent economic problems but preferred to tout his achievements. According to Greenberg, “Biden’s deep personal insecurity and paranoia produced a preposterous campaign based on his accomplishments, in what was really a change election.”

After dropping out, Biden continued to interject himself into the campaign in harmful ways, aided by the fact that his former campaign staff was now running the Harris campaign. As Greenberg recounts:


“Biden did grudgingly drop out—but not until July 21st. The short remaining time led Harris to keep Biden’s campaign largely intact. Before her debate with Trump, he called her and insisted there be “No daylight, kid.”

Biden felt Harris had underutilized him and did everything possible to be part of the story at the close. That led him to join a campaign call during Harris’s closing speech on the Ellipse to observe that “the only garbage I see floating there is his supporters.” Using actual garbage trucks, Trump was able to fuse Biden and Harris and tie them to Hillary Clinton calling Trump voters “deplorables.”…

The campaign wrote an economic speech saying, “As president of the United States, it will be my intention to build on the foundation of this progress,” making it easier to brand Harris with “Bidenomics.”

As I saw, the Biden staff didn’t mind her sliding away from the “cost of living.” Biden would not utter the words because he thought it was criticism of the economy.”


Greenberg’s focus on Biden’s arrogant economic message is an important supplement to the Tapper and Thompson account of Biden’s cognitive decline. Biden’s visible aging was a big political problem—and likely the primary driver of his unpopularity. But it wasn’t the only problem. Out of personal arrogance, perhaps made worse by his cognitive decline, Biden was unable to listen to critics of his domestic and foreign policy. And by insisting that there be “no daylight” between himself and Harris, Biden wrapped an anchor around the neck of his vice president.

While Biden had some genuine domestic achievements, particularly in his first two years, his larger presidency left a blighted record. Democrats won’t be able to win back the public unless they start talking frankly about what when wrong—and how party elites were implicated in the disaster. And until those elites are replaced.

Newly released audio of a special counsel interviewing then-President joe Biden confirms memory lapses that White House officials denied at the time, including a president clearly struggling to remember the year his oldest son died.

Even after the transcript was released, Biden aides, including then-White House spokesman Ian Sams, insisted that the president did not forget the year that his son Beau died of brain cancer. The audio shows that Biden struggled to remember the year and had to be prompted by his lawyers, who were sitting in the interview with him.

The recording of the interview was first released by Axios.

Sams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur is likely to fuel a growing debate among Democrats and others about whether there was a concerted effort to cover up the president’s diminished mental capacity, as well as whether that contributed to the party’s 2024 defeat at the polls. It also comes as several new books offer insight into what many behind the scenes knew.

Biden sat for more than five hours of interviews over two days in October 2023 as part of Hur’s investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents at his home and office from his time as vice president. Hur later cited interviews in which he described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his final report at the end of his investigation.

CNN's Jake Tapper calls his new book a tragedy.Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which Tapper co-authored with Axios' Alex Thompson, describes two Joe Bidens.

The first one is the one that everybody got to know during his vice presidency," Tapper says. "And the second one was kind of a non-functioning Joe Biden. ... And that non-functioning Biden would rear his head increasingly starting in, like, 2019, 2020. And then, as his term went on, more and more behind the scenes."

The book describes a president who failed to recognize longtime political allies, lost his train of thought in important conversations and forgot important dates, including the death of his son, Beau: "We in the public would see some of it in front of the cameras ... but we had no idea how bad it was," Tapper says.

Tapper says one source described a president that was being propped up by aides: "One person told us that the presidency was, at best, a five-person board with Joe Biden as chairman of the board."

Looking back now, Tapper says he regrets not covering Biden's decline more aggressively. "I can point to times where I asked him this or I asked them that ... but knowing what I know now, I barely scratched the surface," he says. "I need to run more towards the discomfort of questions about health because they're so important and they're so under-covered in Washington."

On Sunday, Biden's office issued a statement, revealing that the former president has been diagnosed with an "aggressive form" of prostate cancer, which has metastasized to the bone.

"It is very sad what happens to us, if we're lucky enough to get old. Very few of us retain our acuity until our death in our sleep at age 99," Tapper says. "It is the human condition, and that makes it difficult to report on this. But by the same token, we have a right to believe and expect that a president will be sharp and on top of things."

On the argument that the White House hid Biden's decline
Some of the ways in which they helped hide his deterioration started off innocently enough. I mean, any staffer wants to make a president or a senator or a governor look as good as possible. And if he wants note cards, if he wants a teleprompter, if he wants to do events in the middle of the day instead of early in the morning or late at night — that's all perfectly understandable. But then all of those things became crutches and started really infiltrating his presidency in a serious way to the point that even cabinet meetings, even after the cameras left, were highly scripted.

Members of Congress who went to the White House Christmas party in December 2022 didn't see him again in the flesh, many of them, until December 2023, and they were shocked at what they saw.

Then I think the real part of the cover-up comes with not just the fact that he's at 40- or 50-person fundraisers using a teleprompter, which is bizarre and unprecedented for a president who should be able to speak extemporaneously for 10 minutes. There's the fact they started cordoning him off from people in 2023. So members of Congress who went to the White House Christmas party in December 2022 didn't see him again in the flesh, many of them, until December 2023, and they were shocked at what they saw.

On the Biden team's aggressive response to critical coverage
It happened to me when I was reporting critically on Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. This is just politics in America today. White Houses, parties, have legions of influencers and bots and activists and journalists who agree with them, and those people, half the time you don't even need to give them an order, they'll just go after anybody. It's just par for the course. We cited it not to justify anything, but just to kind of explain the terrain on which journalists were trying to report anything about President Biden. … The White House is calling your story a lie or somebody from the White House threatens to go on the record and call your story a lie, that could be really intimidating. … It also serves as a warning shot for other journalists to not follow up on a story because they see how somebody else is getting raked over the coals, and they might not want to experience that.

On the Democratic Party's reaction to Biden's debate performance
Democrats were shocked. They were just absolutely stunned. And I think there were really two camps. There was the Biden camp, which was, "OK, how do we get out of this? How do we crawl back?" Because Joe Biden, as I said earlier, as a compliment, he cannot be defeated. That's his great attitude. He's not going to be defeated by brain aneurysms, by this tragedy, by that tragedy

You don't need to be a genius political consultant to know that the obvious remedy to fixing what he had just done was to go out and do 15 interviews and 20 town halls and five press conferences and just show people that he was as sharp as a tack as they had been saying. And the problem was he couldn't do that, and that's why his pollsters ultimately concluded there was just no way to get out of it. This was a disaster and it was going to keep getting worse and worse until election day.

On the Democratic reaction to George Clooney's New York Times op-ed, which called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race
They were shocked. After the debate everybody was talking about, "Who's going to say it?" Because very few people were coming forward publicly, even though the voters were clear and many members of the media were clear, a lot of Democratic officials kept quiet. … [The op-ed] had a huge impact because here's a guy [Clooney] who co-hosted the most successful Democratic fundraiser in presidential history. Thirty million dollars raised in one night. Here's a beloved figure who would only make enemies. You can only make enemies from such a thing. And he came out and he was gutsier here then most senators and governors and members of the House.

On the public's lack of trust in legacy media
The news media is in a crisis. … Reporters in general, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, all of us, people don't trust us. One of the reasons they don't trust us is what just happened with Joe Biden and his acuity and the fact that we in the media were pretty late to the story. I should [say], we in the legacy media were late to that story, because conservative media was not late to it. And I think that we are in an existential fight for a free press. Not that it's gonna be taken away, but it certainly runs the risk of not thriving as it has. And that just calls on us to be as good and professional as possible.

I have yet to see anything listed here that even comes close to the word salad that comes out of Trump's mouth every single time. Plus the inability to walk very far, go up or down stairs, etc. And the worse Trump gets, to the point where it can't all be hidden by the media from the public's attention. the more stories start to appear claiming that Biden is the one who is impaired. Well, I'm sure he is, to a certain point, but he's still more on the ball than Trump has ever been.

The first time I realized that Joe Biden might not be playing with a full deck was in 2014 when he addressed an LGBTQ+ rights group. Explaining his 2012 epiphany in support of same-sex marriage, the then-vice president recalled an incident when his father drove him into Wilmington, Delaware for a job interview. “We stopped at a red light,” Biden said. “I looked over to my left, and there were two men kissing good-bye, and I looked, and it was the first time I’d seen that. And my father looked at me and said, ‘They love each other.’” In retelling this anecdote, Biden pinpointed the year as 1961.

One doesn’t need to be an historian of the gay American experience (like me) to suspect that this story was, as Biden himself might say, “malarkey.” In 1961, homosexuality was illegal in every state of the union (Delaware would not decriminalize it until 1973), diagnosed as a mental illness and categorized as a national security threat. The chance that a young Joe Biden randomly encountered two “well-dressed” men kissing in broad daylight in downtown Wilmington on their way to work in 1961 is close to zero.

This impression of Biden’s diminishing mental acuity was compounded by the fact that he had simultaneously recited a significantly different version of the story. In an interview with the New York Times published just three weeks before his speech, Biden said it was [i]one of his sons who had seen the men kissing and that it was he who nonchalantly said, “They love each other.” Despite this version being more plausible, it was the implausible one involving his father that Biden would repeat on multiple occasions.

Episodes like this, which occurred years before Biden decided to run for president in 2020, are important to remember in light of the historical revisionism that the former president’s partisans and their media sycophants have been promoting since the disastrous debate performance that drove him from the 2024 election campaign. In this alternate universe, Biden was a sharp and capable commander-in-chief at worst prone to logorrhea. Those who suggested otherwise were “ageist” enemies of democracy promoting deceptively edited “cheap fake” videos of Biden to aid and abet Donald Trump. For these diehards, still sticking to their guns in the manner of Japanese holdouts discovered on uninhabited islands decades after the Second World War, Biden’s parley with Trump was not a catastrophe the likes of which had not been seen since the advent of televised presidential debates, but merely a “bad night.”

The former president’s deterioration and the effort to hide it from the public feature prominently in three recent tomes about the 2024 campaign: Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by the veteran campaign book-writing duo Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple; and, most sensationally, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The first two focus more squarely on Biden’s ill-fated reelection campaign, while the third, which publishes this week, zeroes in on the cover-up itself. While each book has its individual strengths, revelations and insights, reading them together paints a powerful picture of a presidency in dangerous denial. The impression that the president’s true condition was being kept under wraps was only heightened by the news last weekend that Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, an illness that usually takes years to progress.

Of course, well into the second Trump administration, readers have every right to also question the timing of these books, published long after their revelations could have made a difference to recent history. But better late than never.

The “Original Sin” of Tapper and Thompson’s title refers to Biden’s decision to seek reelection, a choice that surprised many Democrats when his aides started confirming it not long after he was elected in 2020. In December 2019, while Biden was vying for his party’s presidential nomination and four months before he vaguely promised to be a “bridge” to a new “generation of leaders,” four Biden advisers told POLITICO that it was virtually inconceivable he would run for reelection in 2024. Biden’s decline was apparent to his inner circle before the 2020 Democratic Convention, in which, given the pandemic, his participation would consist mostly of pre-taped videos. Even this undemanding medium proved onerous for the then 77-year-old, whose performance speaking virtually with real Americans was, according to two aides, “horrible” as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Despite being edited by some of the best people in the business, little of the material was usable.

The morbid observation by some Biden aides that the pandemic, while terrible for the world, was an enormous boon for their campaign, was entirely accurate. With Biden granted a plausible excuse to avoid active campaigning, the American people were shielded from the physical and mental regression that would become increasingly apparent as the country opened up. And once he entered the White House, it was visible to anyone who saw him up close. “The cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable — and they were from the beginning,” a cabinet secretary told Tapper and Thompson, one of four to speak anonymously with the authors. In October 2021, when Biden addressed the Democratic House caucus in an effort to win their support for an infrastructure package, one member described his 30-minute speech as “incomprehensible.” According to Allen and Parnes, Vice President Kamala Harris’ communications director eventually drew up a spreadsheet listing judges across the country who could administer her the oath of office in the event Biden died.

According to all three accounts, 2023 was the year Biden’s deterioration became undeniable. It was also the year he formally announced his decision to seek reelection, which brought his worrisome condition increasingly into the open. A television ad in which Biden would answer pre-screened questions from a handpicked audience had to be scrapped because none of the footage was usable. At small, intimate events with donors, Biden would avail himself of teleprompters, stop randomly in the middle of his speech and shake hands, and just as randomly start speaking again. That June, following an interview on MSNBC, Biden got up from the desk and wandered off the set as the cameras rolled. The following month at a White House picnic, Biden didn’t recognize Congressman Eric Swalwell, one of his opponents for the nomination. (To be fair to Biden, not recognizing Eric Swalwell is a point in his favor.)

Befitting an inner circle dubbed the “Politburo,” the Biden ascendancy in many ways resembled the Soviet Union in the early 1980s when three successive geriatric leaders died within as many years. The pathetic sight of Barack Obama fetching a spaced out Biden from the edge of the stage at a Hollywood fundraiser and leading him off into the wings recalls the videotaped spectacle of an enfeebled Konstantin Chernenko “voting” in a hospital room shoddily refashioned as a polling place. In one of the more disturbing revelations from Original Sin, White House residence aides were told that they no longer needed to staff the elevator and could leave work early because the proletarian Bidens didn’t like being waited on. The real motive, the authors suggest, was to expand a privacy buffer around the president and limit his exposure to household staff — the kind of move one can imagine in the palace of an aging dictator.

How did a man so evidently unfit for the presidency come so close to securing renomination?

Hubris, predicated upon a series of contingencies and counterfactuals. Biden’s decision not to challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, her subsequent loss to Donald Trump, and his victory over Trump four years later, gave Biden and his circle a feeling of political infallibility. Add yet another counterfactual — the possibility that Biden might have remained in the race and somehow beat Trump — and you have a situation where the people who got us into this mess can persist in claiming they were right.

The excuses the Biden team served to inquiring reporters and concerned Democrats were transparent nonsense. “He’s just not a great communicator,” a senior White House official told Tapper and Thompson, bringing to mind the late Christopher Hitchens’ moniker for Amtrak Joe, “the Great Commuter.” (Alas, one who “never sits in the quiet car.”) Speaking of the Gipper, longtime Biden adviser Mike Donilon defended his boss by pointing out that the 40th president also once had a bad debate. Indeed, Ronald Reagan became a go-to punching bag for Democrats defensive of Biden’s age, his supposedly undiagnosed Alzheimer’s largely responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal. A quick look at Reagan’s vigorous final press conference dispels such illusions

The most important service these post-mortem volumes provide is naming the people who gaslit the country. Chief among the malefactors is Donilon, informal leader of “the Politburo” and a figure who blends the ethics of Bob Haldeman with the avarice of Bob Menendez. In 2022, explaining the rationale for a second Biden term, Donilon revealed the altruism that directed him towards a life of public service: “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” For his selfless contribution to safeguarding democracy, Donilon demanded an astonishing $4 million fee, a figure difficult to square with his party’s ostensible commitment to gender equity considering that Jennifer O’Malley Dillion, the actual campaign manager, had a $300,000 salary. Most astoundingly, Tapper and Thompson reveal that Donilon was the only person who shared polling data with Biden, thus earning him a place in history alongside the advisers who told the last Shah of Iran that he remained popular with his people. To this day Donilon is deluded as ever, recently treating Harvard undergraduates to a bizarre rant in which he declared that it was the Democratic leadership which had in fact “lost its mind.”

Next is Steve Richetti, one of Biden’s White House counselors whose main function appears to have been obsessively watching Morning Joe every day and regaling White House staff with all the nice things that the Democratic Party mouthpieces who host it said about the terrific jobs they were doing. Following a White House meeting with Democratic Governors a week after the debate, a concerned Maura Healey of Massachusetts told Richetti about the troubling exchange she had just had with the commander-in-chief in which he cited polls showing him beating Trump. Healey was unaware of such polls because they didn’t exist. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” Richetti retorted. “I know polls.” Two weeks later, after a meeting with a group of pollsters bearing bad news, Richetti angrily called one of them and snapped, “You’re supposed to tell us how to win, not that we can’t.”

One almost feels sorry for Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff. To have one of the most insecure men in American politics declare that “only one person here is smarter than me and it’s Ron” suggests how Klain could have become so servile towards his boss. When former Obama adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times that Biden “would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term,” Klain chewed his ear off. The following year, when talent agent extraordinaire Ari Emanuel expressed similar worries while subjecting Klain to one of his world-famous tirades at the Aspen Institute, Klain, according to Allen and Parnes, “brushed the concern aside.” Even though, as Klain later told Whipple, he feared the debate would be a “nationally televised disaster,” three weeks after said disaster he was telling Biden to stay in the race.

The hubris of Anita Dunn, “the grand dame of Beltway public relations” in the words of Allen and Parnes, derived from her belief that she was the reason Biden won his decisive victory in the 2020 South Carolina Democratic primary. Though Congressman Jim Clyburn deserved the credit, Dunn and O’Malley Dillon “were touted as geniuses,” according to Whipple. Believing her own press, Dunn vastly overestimated her abilities, lecturing a Biden pollster in early 2023 that “we don’t need polling. The decision has been made. He’s running.” Following the debate, she told Whipple that Biden “had actually won…with people who mattered,” a constituency that apparently excluded the vast majority of the voting public. Alas, not even this level of purblind loyalty was sufficient to maintain Biden’s trust. Dunn’s one saving grace — her insistence that Biden’s prodigal son Hunter be kept as far away from the campaign as possible — alienated the First Son, who turned his father against her.

Hunter’s antics and shady business dealings were more than just a tabloid sideshow, Tapper and Thompson write, because the drama surrounding him symbolized “a family dynamic built around rejection of reality.” In a revealing display of grandiosity, Hunter told his family that if Donald Trump was able to strike back at his critics, so should he. Hunter was the leading advocate for the novel theory that it was not Biden who blundered the debate but rather his advisers who left him ill-prepared. Family dynamics comprise a significant part of this Shakespearean tragedy. When Joe was vice president, he went to great lengths hiding the extent of older son Beau’s illness, foreshadowing the later concealment of his own decline. And it wasn’t just the Bidens who treated the presidency as a family business. Donilon’s niece served on the National Security Council, Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed’s daughter was Biden’s day scheduler, and all four of Richetti’s children had administration jobs.

If there was anyone within the Biden brood who had the influence, never mind the responsibility, to stop the impending disaster that was the 2024 reelection campaign, it was Jill, or “Dr.” Jill as she insisted on being called. (“Lady McBiden,” as Alexandra Pelosi referred to her, is more fitting.) Alas, Jill was even “more firm than her husband about maintaining a residence at Pennsylvania Avenue,” according to Allen and Parnes. Anthony Bernal, who exerted more power than perhaps any other chief of staff to a first lady, was the natural extension of his boss, with his incessant talk about “the second term,” his planning Jill’s 2025 travel schedule, and his pronouncements that “You don’t run for four years — you run for eight.”

Rounding out this rogues’ gallery are senior communications staffers TJ Ducklo and Andrew Bates, who behaved like the mooks in a third-rate mob movie. Ducklo, fired early in the administration for threatening to “destroy” a female reporter and who clearly saw himself as the muscle of this witless duo, was brought back for the re-elect mainly to bully Democrats into attacking journalists who reported on Biden’s age. Bates, meanwhile, reached Baghdad Bob-level comedic heights during the final months of the campaign with his ludicrous attestations to Biden’s fearsome mental and physical stamina. My personal favorite, issued on X during a NATO press conference in which Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” and confused his own vice president with Trump, was, “To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that f*****g good.” Presented with these characters, one can’t help but feel pity for the luckless Karine Jean-Pierre, who as the public face of the Biden White House had the unenviable job of defending its numbskull denizens on a daily basis.

Finally, there are the many Democrats who witnessed the president’s senescence yet said nothing. At the top of this list is Schiff, who lambasted Hur on national television for having the temerity to remark upon Biden’s “poor memory.” A few months later, after Biden confirmed Hur’s assessment on the CNN debate stage, Schiff went around telling colleagues that Biden needed to drop out. When Schiff finally mustered the fortitude to say this out loud, this profile in courage became the 23rd member of Congress to do so. A public apology to Hur has not been forthcoming.

Revealingly, none of these books>are interested in the essential role that the media played in the cover-up. Given how much the press valorizes itself for defending democracy, its dereliction of duty regarding Biden’s infirmities is a massive failure. To be sure, the Biden White House didn’t make things easy for reporters; it’s no coincidence that the two journalists granted the most access to Biden — Evan Osnos of the New Yorker and Franklin Foer of the Atlantic overlooked the biggest story of his presidency. But lack of access is no excuse. When POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger produced a deeply reported, unvarnished book about the Biden family’s half-century rise to power in 2021, the mainstream media ignored it. With the exception of Thompson, one of the handful of journalists who consistently reported on Biden’s fitness and who bears the scars of vicious White House attacks on his character to prove it, most of the media declined to investigate Biden’s disposition because it interfered with a higher priority: saving the country from Donald Trump.

The individuals who collaborated in the cover-up of Joe Biden’s condition deserve to be shunned. While many contributed to the disaster that was the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination process, ultimate responsibility rests with Biden himself. Like Bill Clinton, who made his family, friends, and advisers lie for him over a personal matter, Joe Biden obliged his supporters to engage in deception on his behalf. While Clinton clearly understood what he was doing, however, we can’t say the same about Biden. Cocooned by mendacious aides and grasping family members, his cognitive functions degenerating rapidly, the perception of Biden as a vulnerable senior citizen manipulated by others is unnervingly realistic. But while Clinton’s duplicity concerned the minutiae of sex, Biden’s affected the fate of the world. The lie that he, his family, and his underlings foisted on the American public was severe as any Donald Trump has ever told.

How did Biden manage to do what he did, which was a lot of good things, when supposed 'curly,tap, tap, cuckoo'(as my late wife would've put it). Many more good things than Trump managed to do?

I still think he should have withdrawn earlier, because rightly or wrongly public perceptions matter, also the cancer issue, but you don't achieve what he achieved if your cognitively 'away with the fairies'.