Months before President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was forced to abandon his re -election campaign, his main White House helped to discuss a cognitive evidence to demonstrate his aptitude for a second mandate determined against the measure, according to a strengthened book.
The account illustrates the degree to which the main aid of Mr. Biden housed deep fears on how voters saw their age and mental acity. The book, “2024: how Trump resumed the White House and the Democrats lost America,” by Tyler Pager of the New York Times, Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post, will be launched in July.
Mr. Biden’s assistants trusted that he would pass a cognitive test, according to the book, but they were concerned that the mere fact that he took a new questions about his mental skills. At the same time, the life doctor of Mr. Biden, Kevin O’Connor, had told the attendees that he would not take into consideration the political position of the 81 -year -old president when treating him.
The Toke Place discussion in February 2024, a few weeks before the final physical examination of Mr. Biden’s White House and a period prior to some of his most harmful public episodes.
A representative of Mr. Biden declined to comment.
The same month that Biden Ayedes considered the cognitive evidence, Robert K. Hur, the special lawyer who investigated the management of Mr. Biden of classified documents, published a report that concluded that the president was “an older, well -intentioned and greater man with a bad memory.” Mr. Biden held a night press conference to deliver an angry response in which he referred to the president of Egypt as president of Mexico and declared: “My memory is fine.”
By then, it was becoming obvious that former President Donald J. Trump would be the Republican candidate. Trump, three years younger than Mr. Biden, boasted the duration of the first term on having approved a cognitive test, although the details were incomplete. His essay of a sequence of five words that had ceased on the leg to memorize: “Person, woman, man, camera, television”, a joke in the political circles of Washington in 2020.
Through the presidency of Mr. Biden and especially killing his re -election offer, his AIDS and advisors to argue that the media were unfair in how he covered his age, feeding the negative perception of the voters of his vigor. Few influential figures in the White House or in their campaign would interview the idea that I was fighting to make their presidential dresses.
“On the subject of his age, I thought that the best response would be the performance,” said Mike Donilon, a main advisor to Mr. Biden, who had worked for him as the 1980s, Harvard Political Review in March. “Every day, I kept seeing him to do the job. I still think he is the best person to be president today.”
But outside the tight internal circle of Mr. Biden, many democratic politicians and strategists asked to worry in silence as their re -election offer. By June 2022, the Democrats spoke with each other about their potential to drag the 2024 ticket, with many suggestions that they should not run again.
An article from the New York Times included an interview with David Axelrod, former president Barack Obama advisor, who has become one of the older statesmen in the party.
Mr. Axelrod said that Mr. Biden “looks at his age”, then 79, and that he was feeding a narrative that he was no longer up to the work of being president.
“The harsh reality is that the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be an important problem,” said Axelrod.
That comment caused a call angry at Mr. Axelrod by Ron Klain, then Chief of Cabinet of Mr. Biden, according to the book. Mr. Klain wanted to know why Mr. Axelrod was feeding doubts about a Democratic president who was on his way to starting a re -election campaign.
“There is no Obama out there, Ax,” Mr. Klain told him, the book recounts. “Who will do it if it does not?”
