President Biden’s Team wanted him to take a cognitive test months before his disastrous debate performance made it impossible for him to continue in the 2024 presidential race, but then decided against doing so, a new book claims.
2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America is authored by Tyler Pager, a reporter for The New York Times, Josh Dawsey, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter for The Washington Post, and is due to release in July.
In 2024, the authors detail debates held by top aides months as early as February 2024 over whether President Biden should be made to take a cognitive test.
The book claims the aides were confident he would pass a test, but they believed making him take one would only highlight his age and play into his opponents’ hands.
February 2024 was when Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report about the former president’s mishandling of classified documents was released.
In the report, Hur described Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The book also details how Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, called David Axelrod to remonstrate with him about a New York Times report that quoted Axelrod as saying, “The stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue.”
“That comment prompted an angry call to Mr. Axelrod from Ron Klain, then Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, according to the book. Mr. Klain wanted to know why Mr. Axelrod was fueling doubts about a Democratic president who was on track to begin a re-election campaign,” according to The New York Times.
“There’s no Obama out there, Axe,” Klain is reported to have said, adding “Who’s going to do it if he doesn’t do it?”
Meanwhile, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has claimed she had no idea about President Biden’s cognitive decline until his disastrous performance in his debate last year with Donald Trump, which led to his exit from the presidential race.
Speaking with Ben Smith of Semafor, Psaki dismissed the notion of a “coverup” of Joe Biden’s worsening mental state.
“I never saw that person —not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day, that was on that debate stage,” Psaki said.
“I’m not a doctor. Aging happens quite quickly,” she added, before telling her host “coverup” is a “very loaded term,” which should only be used to describe crimes.
“People use that term as related to Watergate. Or the covering up of not sharing public information about a war,” she explained. “I think it’s a bit of a dangerous term.”
The final straw for Joe Biden’s backers was his appalling performance in his presidential debate with Donald Trump.
According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, the debate made it impossible to hide his decline any further, and Barack Obama and Kamala Harris stepped in with a threat to invoke the 25th Amendment if Biden didn’t withdraw from the race.
“It’s not surprising that the long overdue unraveling of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign happened when it became impossible to keep his increasing impairment covered up,” Hersch explains.
“It was the big-time money backers of the Democratic Party who called off the game of see no evil, hear no evil, after Biden’s shocking performance in his June debate with Donald Trump. They balked at continuing to give millions of dollars to the party now that there was evidence that the president is not always there.”