A Conversation between Joe Biden and the Donilon Campaign Strategist: Covering Biden’s 30 Years in the White House, How he Found the Words of Independence
Bidens decline makes up big chunks of Original Sin. During a bus tour of Iowa, Biden was stumped by the name of Mike Donilon, a campaign strategist and White House adviser who had worked with him for four decades. Biden forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence in 2020. We have these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing.”) One day in the White House in 2022, he could not summon the names of his national security adviser (Jake Sullivan, whom he called Steve) and his communications director (Kate Bedingfield, whom he called Press), both of whom were standing near him. Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fund-raiser in 2024, and had to remind him who he was.
During his vice presidency, everyone was aware of the first one, Tapper says. The second one was just not functioning with 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.”
In front of the cameras, we would see a president who forgot important dates, lost his train of thought, and did not recognize long-time political allies. “We didn’t know 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.”
The issue became part of a broader conversation during the June 2024 debate between Biden and Trump. Biden spoke slowly and struggled to articulate his reasons for being reelected to the office. Tapper wondered if he’d make it through all 90 minutes of the debate. Biden pulled out of the race a month later.
I regret not covering Biden’s decline more aggressively, says Tapper. “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 have to be more cautious of questions about health because they are so important and they are not covered in Washington.
My heart goes out to him. My thoughts are with him. The therapy for the cancer is called hormone therapy. This is part and parcel of the story of Joe Biden. … The book was written as a tragedy: Here is a person that has gone through so much in his life. A lot of horrible things have happened to him in his life, and that instilled a spirit which many people love, which is the guy who gets up after getting knocked down. It also made a sort of theology around Biden where he could do anything. If you back a little bit, you can see that the situation we’re in is caused by Donald Trump and Republicans controlling the House and the Senate.
“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.”
The ways in which they helped hide his decline began innocently. 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.
The members of Congress who went to the White House Christmas party in December of 2022, but didn’t see him again until December 2023, were shocked by 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. Many of the Congress members who went to the White House Christmas party in December 2022 didn’t see him again until December 2023, and they were shocked by what they saw.
It happened to me when I was reporting on Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is not a big deal 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 not really different from 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 will call your story a lie if you go ahead with it, that could be intimidating if you choose to do so. It serves as a warning to other journalists to stay away from a story because they see how another person is treated and they might not want to see that.
They were surprised. Everybody was wondering who would say it after the debate. Even though the voters and the media were clear, a lot of Democratic officials kept quiet. The op-ed had an effect because there’s a guy. The most successful Democratic fundraiser of all time was co-hosted by Clooney. 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.
If he wants to fix what he has just done, he should go out and do 15 interviews and 20 town halls and five press conferences, show people that he was as sharp as a tack, and then he should be good to go. 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.
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.
An Interview with Biden in 2024 During the 2020 Presidential Campaign: A Man’s View of his Family and His Influence on the Oval Office
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Three people adapted it for the web.
Many of the book’s 200 sources agreed to talk only after the election, and Tapper and Thompson highlight this in an authors’ note. “Some spoke to us with regret that they hadn’t done more, or that they had waited so long,” Tapper and Thompson write. Many were angry and felt betrayed by Biden and his inner circle of advisers, allies and family. In campaign books, guilt, blame and not-my-fault-ism are standard impulses of the losing side.
Biden’s performance in the debate with Trump on June 27, 2024 will be preceded by a number of examples reported by Tapper and Thompson. The world saw what he did at his only debate in the year 2024. It wasn’t a cold and it wasn’t someone who was underprepared. It was not someone who was tired.
Biden aides such as Donilon and Steve Ricchetti were accused by the authors of lying about the health of the president. Senior aides to Biden viewed his age as a political vulnerability, not a serious limitation on his abilities, according to the article. Four years later, they told themselves that even a reduced Biden would be better than a Trump redux. “Biden, his family and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” the authors write.