Are You Shocked Biden Needed This to Prepare for What Would Be a Disastrous CNN Debate?

The New York Times finally joined the rest of the world in acknowledging one thing: Joe Biden is mentally deficient and has been for years. Since day one, Joe has exhibited signs of mental decrepitude, which led to a tight inner circle controlling the events surrounding the president to keep him on track and looking publicly vibrant for as long as possible. Jill Biden was part of this cabal, which the Times fleshed out in a lengthy article that would have been excoriated last summer for being out of line and borderline fake news because Joe Biden was fit, mentally sharp, and ready for a second term. The CNN debate last June obliterated that narrative.  

The perception of Joe being too old always seems at the back of everyone’s mind. As the 2024 cycle approached, even his top aides did little things to obscure the mental and physical limitations. They surrounded him with aides when walking to Marine One in a vain attempt to cover the unusual gait he acquired for not wearing a boot for fracturing his foot before his inauguration in 2020. It left him with that noticeable gait that reeks of ‘old man.’ The travel drained Joe during the D-Day commemoration, where even French officials commented that the president looked like he was in a fog or out of it. 

NYT columnist Charles Blow, May 2023: “The Manufactured Panic Over Biden’s Age” pic.twitter.com/qCOTecMyAx

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) January 18, 2025

Preparing for the debate, which would be an election-killing moment for Biden, included naptime. The publication described the months leading up to the thick of the 2024 election cycle as serially bad, an inescapable storm of bad press which, in retrospect, we all saw coming when he fell off a bike while vacationing in Delaware and tripping over a sandbag at the US Air Force Academy’s commencement. As for money for the war chest, it’s hard to convince the fat cats of the Democratic Party when you ramble and increase fears among the donor base that you’re not up for the job, despite whatever Jill Biden, aka Lady MacBeth, and her minions say. Joe needed a teleprompter for even small donor gatherings, which unnerved many. It’s almost as if the Times knew this already, or at least could have done this more than 18 months ago but didn’t for obvious political reasons. Better late than never? I don’t know—Biden can’t remember some executive orders he supposedly signed. So, who’s been running the country (via NYT) [emphasis mine]: 

Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump heads back to the White House, demoralized Democrats debate what might have been had the president bowed out in time to let a younger generation run. Mr. Biden, 82, has at the same time made the extraordinary admission that he might not have made it through a second term. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” he said in an interview with USA Today on Jan. 5. 

The president’s acknowledgment has put a new spotlight on his family and inner circle, all of whom dismissed concerns from voters and Mr. Biden’s own party that he was too old for the job. And yet they recognized his physical frailty to a greater degree than they have publicly acknowledged. Then they cooperated, according to interviews with more than two dozen aides, allies, lawmakers and donors, to manage his decline. 

They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing. 

They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls. 

Mr. Biden’s fumbles continued this week. In announcing a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday he confused the emir of Kuwait with the emir of Qatar and said Hezbollah rather than Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. He also referred to his national security adviser as “Secretary Jake Sullivan” before catching himself. 

Six key people protected the president. 

Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. [Mike] Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule. 

[…] 

The president made so many rambling remarks at other fund-raisers over the summer that several supporters called his advisers to plead for him to be more focused and on message. Others who saw Mr. Biden thought the wear and tear of the presidency was taking its toll.

[…] 

At a meeting with potential donors in Boston in the summer of 2022, the first lady heard directly from Joshua Bekenstein, the chairman of Bain Capital. In an episode reported earlier by NBC, Mr. Bekenstein praised Mr. Biden’s leadership, and said he could leave public life proud of a one-term legacy. 

What happened next is not widely known. Mr. Bekenstein went on to say that if Mr. Biden was not running again, he should announce it to give other Democrats time to get in the race, according to two people briefed on the conversation. Mr. Bekenstein had been under the impression that Mr. Biden had promised to be a one-term candidate. 

The paper later revealed that Mr. Bekenstein’s one-term remarks shocked Biden officials. But the part they buried, of course, was the ‘Biden is mentally astute behind closed doors,’ which they had to mention at the end in the section relating to Biden’s activities after his July announcement, where he formally withdrew from the race: 

Mr. Biden’s allies said he remained sharp in private situations. 

Roger Harrison, who was Mr. Biden’s deputy chief of staff when he was a senator in the 1970s and has remained a close friend, visited him at the White House in September, shortly after he had dropped out of the race. 

“I’m sitting at the desk with him,” Mr. Harrison recalled. “His staff brought in a speech on gun violence that he was going to deliver in the East Room that afternoon. So he goes through the speech, and he has a pen, and he goes line by line, page by page, marking it up. We then went to a meeting with his staff, and he told them what changes he wanted to make. It was like I was back in the Senate, when I would hand him a speech. His procedure was no different than what I saw 30 years ago, 40 years ago.” 

At the same time, Mr. Harrison said, he noticed “cosmetic changes” in how the president walked and spoke. 

“I used to tell him, ‘You know, you have a great voice. It’s smooth. It’s clear. You have a voice like Ronald Reagan. That’s one of your attributes,’” Mr. Harrison said. “Sadly, it’s noticeably less. But you know the old adage: Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

No, we can judge, and we did—by electing Donald J. Trump the 47^th president of the United States. 

This post was originally published on here