Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain revealed that former President Joe Biden was “fatigued, befuddled and disengaged” before his debate with President Donald Trump in June, according to a new book.
“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” author Chris Whipple wrote, Klain “was startled. He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool,” according to an excerpt published by The Guardian.
Whipple’s new book, titled “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” is set to be released this month. Klain, a close ally and major supporter of the former president, served as his chief of staff from 2021 until 2023 and helped Biden prepare for his June debate against Trump.
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple wrote, according to the excerpt. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
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The debate preparation team then organized two mock debates for Biden.
“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject. All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs. He had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term,” Whipple wrote.
Klain, according to Whipple, said the president was irritable as he pushed back on the former chief of staff’s suggestions.
“25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. ‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,’” Klain said, according to the excerpt. “‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.”
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Whipple said in an interview with Politico about his book that many of Biden’s closest aides were in a “fog of delusion” about the former president, and calling it a “cover-up” did not go far enough.
“I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story,” Whipple told Politico on Sunday. “I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”
Biden’s team did not immediately return a request for comment.
Whipple’s book is one of several coming out this year about the 2024 campaign, one of the most chaotic and unpredictable election seasons in recent history.
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The Hill’s Amie Parnes and NBC News’ Jonathan Allen also have a book about the campaign and what led up to the former president dropping out of the race.
According to Allen, former President Barack Obama did not want former Vice President Kamala Harris to replace Biden on the ticket and worked against her efforts behind the scenes.
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson are also releasing a book, titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” in May.
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