President Biden’s top aides denied he was cognitively slipping right up until his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump in June, even as donors warned that his aging appearance was “f–king up” his re-election campaign, a new book reveals.
Members of the cabinet, the National Security Council and other senior advisers found the president “commanding” in briefings and waved off accusations of mental decline as “more of an optics problem,” according to Bob Woodward’s tell-all “War,” out next week.
“He’s alert,” claimed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. “Every meeting I went to with President Biden, without fail, he had obviously done his homework.”
Maggie Goodlander, a former Biden Justice Department official now running for Congress in New Hampshire, told her husband, Jake Sullivan — Biden’s national security adviser — that she “felt the urge to secretly record” the president’s phone calls with Sullivan to dispel rumors of his mental decline.
However, even Goodlander admitted that watching Biden’s stumbling television appearances were “harrowing” experiences.
Donors were more candid, urging the 81-year-old Biden to not get caught on camera shuffling in and out of the White House — a nearly impossible task, with the world’s media recording almost every move the president made.
“You’re f–king up your campaign,” one Hollywood CEO cautioned Biden after a Silicon Valley fundraiser in May 2024, Woodward recounts.
“Every time you get out and walk, people think ‘old,’” the movie mogul said. “Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re filmed walking.”
White House aides had begun to form a bubble around Biden months earlier, before questions of his cognitive acuity mounted in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur’s February report on the president’s “willful” mishandling of classified documents from his vice presidency and Senate days.
Hur chose not to prosecute the president, in part because he believed a jury would view Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“There’s this sense that he’s being protected by his staff,” acknowledged undersecretary for defense policy Colin Kahl, who accused Republicans of having “accentuated” the notion that Biden “is essentially old, out of it, and he’s kind of wheeled out on a stage by his staff. And really, he doesn’t run the government.”
The president took some responsibility for the verbal stumbles, telling Kahl: “My problem is not that I say what I mean. It’s that I say everything I mean [emphasis original].”
But both Kahl and White House chief of staff Jeff Zients denied Biden had “diminished mentally” in any way.
“Biden is driving the schedule,” Zients told donors in a phone call before the CNN debate. “He’s the one who wants to do everything, not the staff.”
The internal assessments were at odds with public perception in the lead-up to the June 27 showdown with Trump in Atlanta.
At least 80% of Americans and 73% of registered voters said Biden, now 81, was “too old to be effective,” Woodward notes, while one of the president’s friends told the scribe in December of last year: “He’s exhausted half the time. … That’s obvious in his voice.”
While Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s personal physician, insisted following the president’s physical in February 2024 that a “detailed neurologic exam” found no “cerebellar or other central neurological disorder,” other doctors suggested signs of Parkinson’s disease were evident.
“I could have diagnosed [Biden] from across the mall,” neurologist Dr. Tom Pitts told NBC News Now’s “Top Story with Tom Llamas” in July, weeks before Biden dropped out.
“His advisers insisted that their experience with the president was different to how he appeared at public events,” Woodward writes, while pointing out that outside of his working hours, which were reportedly sometimes as few as six per day, Biden was “increasingly muddled.”
“A review of empirical evidence suggests that Biden’s age was clearly impacting his ability to perform coherently at some public events from the summer of 2023,” the author concluded.
Though Secretary of State Antony Blinken believed Biden was still up to the job after the debate disaster, America’s top diplomat knew that the 2024 race had become “about [Biden] and [Biden’s] capacity,” and told the president as much at a private July 4 lunch.
“That’s going to make it harder to succeed in November because this has to get back to Trump or alternatively there has to be such a strong affirmative agenda that carries the day,” the Cabinet official said. “But as long as this question is the predominant question, it’s hard.”
The conversation left Biden in doubt about whether he would still be able to lead in two or four years if he defeated Trump.
A coalition of influential donors, like Hollywood star George Clooney, and powerful Capitol Hill Democrats successfully pushed Biden to end his re-election campaign on July 21, followed by his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.
