This may seems like it’s stating the obvious.
But the details are still shocking.
Everyone knows that former President Joe Biden’s mental fitness was the exact reason many Democrats wanted to force Biden out of the 2024 presidential race.
After his disastrous debate performance against current President Donald Trump last year, Democratic leaders got their wish after Biden announced he was leaving the race.
And they’re probably counting their lucky stars after news recently broke of stunning firsthand accounts of what was really going on between Biden’s ears leading up to that infamous debate and subsequent political downfall.
Yesterday a report surfaced that in a new book by author Chris Whipple, former Biden White House aide Ron Klain reportedly had some interesting observations about Biden’s state of mind, or rather, the lack thereof, before his one debate with Donald Trump.
Whipple’s new book titled, “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” is set to be released this month.
In the report by The Guardian, which cited excerpts from the book, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain revealed that Biden was “fatigued, befuddled and disengaged” before his debate with Trump last June
“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” author Chris Whipple wrote, Klain “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,” according to an excerpt of the upcoming book.
Klain, a close ally and major supporter of Biden, served as his chief of staff from 2021 until 2023 and helped Biden prepare for his June debate against Trump.
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple wrote, according to the excerpt.
“Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
Leading up to the debate, Whipple detailed an account that according to Klain he revealed that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job”.
Klain also detailed a shocking idea Biden pitched to his debate prep team — purposely looking perplexed.
“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot,” the book states.
Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”
Whipple also said in a recent interview with Politico about his book that many of Biden’s closest aides were in a “fog of delusion” about the former president, and calling it a “cover up” did not go far enough.
“I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story,” Whipple told Politico during an interview last Sunday.
“I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”