A new report in The Wall Street Journal explains how Joe Biden’s White House functioned despite the 82-year-old outgoing president’s noticeable declining mental faculties.
According to interviews with nearly 50 sources, Biden’s “inner circle” worked to keep him insulated, scheduled meetings around his “good and bad days” and enlisted a speech coach to help with his “fading warble.”
Via the WSJ:
At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble.
The WSJ reports Biden’s closest aides would limit the information he consumed, the people he spoke with, and control his meetings and their contents, a practice that began with limiting his exposure during the Covid pandemic.
More from the WSJ:
…[A] sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes. [emphasis ours]
The Journal claims aides adjusted Biden’s intermittent schedule to take meetings later in the day rather than in the AM “since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning,” and a meeting cancellation was at one point explained by a national security official as Biden having “good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”
“The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age,” The Journal notes
One legislator, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), told The Journal he’d planned to meet with Biden as part of the committee to address plans to leave from Afghanistan ahead of the disastrous withdrawal that left 13 US service members and 150 Afghans dead.
“I was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.
Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W. Va.) told the Journal he’d observed Biden was losing stamina and noticed staffers were picking up the slack, with Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain claiming the administration’s “agenda and pace” were being conducted at the “president’s direct and leadership.”
WSJ reports administrative matters would often get filtered through Biden’s senior staff members including economic adviser Lael Brainard and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who would then relay messages to Biden and liaison back and forth.
Meetings with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, whose counsel was needed on the Ukraine and Israel wars, also grew far and few between.
Defense Secretary Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people familiar with the relationship said.
During the first half of the administration, Austin was one of the cabinet members who would regularly attend Biden’s presidential daily briefing on a rotational basis each week. That briefing would be followed with a routine one-on-one in which Austin and Biden would meet personally behind closed doors.
[…]
But in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was seldom scheduled. When the one-on-one meetings did take place, they were more typically virtual meetings, not in-person. Still, Austin could always get an unscheduled meeting with the president if he needed it.
Throughout the campaign Biden, was also insulated by staffers from viewing bad polling data, to the point where he mischaracterized polls following his disastrous debate with Trump as showing a “tossup.”
The facade was going smoothly – that is until Biden demonstrated in front of the entire country he was unable to string together a coherent sentence during a job interview for the most important position in the world.
Biden’s poor performance at the fateful June 27 debate culminated in him dropping out of the presidential race 24 days later.