There is suddenly a growing cottage industry of former Biden aides and far-left “journalists” who had close access to Old Joe publishing tell-all books discussing the former alleged president’s dementia. There are so many of these, in fact, that it is no longer possible to sustain the idea that anyone, anyone at all, who was inside or around the Biden White House didn’t know that the aged old liar was no longer with us, except as the empty shell of the former cheerfully glib corruptocrat whom so many Beltway insiders had come to loathe.
What all these suddenly honest brokers don’t seem to realize is how much their new confessions constitute an indictment of their own behavior while Old Joe was still pretending to be president. In those days, the same people who are now pumping out all these exposés through the far left’s propaganda arm known as the mainstream publishing industry were going before the cameras and telling their comrades in the far left’s propaganda arm known as the mainstream media that Biden was fit as a fiddle, sharp as a tack, and running circles around aides who were less than half his age.
The latest to join this ridiculous charade is none other than Ron Klain, Old Joe’s chief of staff for the first two years of his presidency, or whatever that was. Klain was widely touted during those years as being the guy who was really making the decisions as president, and he may have been, but he never gave the slightest shadow of a hint in those years or the final two of Biden’s faux-presidency, during which he remained one of the old kleptocrat’s top advisors, that Old Joe wasn’t really the man in charge.
Now, however, it’s a different story. The Guardian reported Wednesday that “in a new book, Joe Biden’s former White House chief of staff paints a devastating picture of the then US president’s mental and physical state before the debate with Donald Trump that sent his 2024 campaign into a tailspin, resulting in his relinquishing the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris.” During that entire drama that played out among the Democrats last summer, as they threw Biden under the bus and replaced him with Harris, do you recall Ron Klain saying a word about Biden’s cognitive abilities? Neither do I.
Now, however, Klain, without a trace of self-awareness and certainly without an apology for covering up how bad off Old Joe really was, says that during the 2024 debate prep, his former boss “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was” and “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation.”
“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” says Chris Whipple, who wrote the book in which Klain’s revelations appear, the former chief of staff “was startled. He’d never seen him 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.” At a later meeting, Biden, says Klain, “was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’” According to Whipple, Klain “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US. ‘He just became very enraptured with being the head of Nato,’ he said.”
During another debate prep session, Biden “seemed befuddled.” And “25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. ‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,’ he said. ‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.” In all the meetings, “the president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged. Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.” And, of course, it was.
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Yet publicly, Klain was insisting that Biden was just the guy to be president, saying: “If I thought he wasn’t the right candidate to beat Donald Trump, I wouldn’t be for him running. But I think he is the right candidate.” And in response to the Guardian’s story, Klain even now insists: “I never doubted the president’s mental acuity.”
If Klain is being honest about that, there is good reason to doubt his mental acuity. Whether he is lying now or simply deluded, he has certainly shown himself to be unfit to hold a position of public trust in the United States. Yet more books of this kind are certain to come out. When it’s all over, how many former Biden aides will have unwittingly indicted themselves and their behavior during the disastrous Biden presidency?
