Add Ron Klain to the chorus of voices suddenly letting the world know that Now the Truth Can Be Told™ about former President Joe Biden’s doddering mental state before he dropped out of the presidential race last year.
Klain, as you might recall, was one of the individuals closest to the former president — and one who many say helped erect a human fence protecting him from any sort of serious interaction with the media or other elected officials. After serving as his White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, he returned for debate prep during the 2024 campaign.
And — wouldn’t you know it? — he too seemed to know that the president was doomed, according to a new book, although he still seemed to be in denial about whether he should drop out.
In several excerpts and quotes pulled from journalist Chris Whipple’s upcoming book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” Klain said that Biden was out of it during the debate because he “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was,” adding that the president needed to nap during debate prep and couldn’t get through a single practice debate, according to the U.K. Guardian, which has a copy of the book.
In addition, the Wednesday report has Klain on record saying Biden “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation” and that he “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.”
Even in a torrent of books tumbling out about Biden’s state during his final months in the White House, Whipple’s work had promised to be especially damning. The reporter had previously written a mostly sycophantic account of Biden’s time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (“The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,” in case you want to read a former “60 Minutes” producer slobber over the prior administration). But this time, Whipple, too, promised to be damning.
“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 last week.
“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.”
Which includes Klain, according to the book.
Did Biden experience severe mental decline in the White House?
“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, [Klain] was startled,” Whipple wrote.
“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.”
“That evening Biden met again with Klain and his team, [Biden aides] Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Bruce Reed. ‘We sat around the table,’ said Klain. ‘[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.’”
Klain had “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the U.S.,” according to Whipple.
“‘He just became very enraptured with being the head of NATO,’ he said. That wouldn’t help him on Capitol Hill because, as Klain noted, ‘domestic political leaders don’t really care what [Emmanuel] Macron and [Olaf] Scholz think.’”
And, a direct quote attributed to Biden relayed by Klain about Macron, Scholz, and other foreign leaders: “These guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president.”
Whether or not they thought he was so great because he was senescent and therefore pliable is up to speculation. Point is, these quotes are so outlandish, they sound like they’re from a bad movie. Say what you will about “Weekend at Bernie’s” — the movie oft invoked when talking about Biden’s administration — but at least Bernie had the common sense to keep his mouth shut while the people around him propped him up and pretended he was alive.
For instance, take a moment during the debate prep, where Klain told Whipple that Biden had come up with the genius idea to act confused every time Trump talked.
“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race,’” Whipple wrote.
And, in two mock debates which were such obvious auguries for what would eventually occur that even Anton Chekhov would have been like, “Whoa, stop flashing that gun around before the third act, hombres,” the nominal leader of the free world couldn’t make it even halfway through one.
“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45,” Whipple wrote. “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.”
Klain advised Biden to reiterate his pledge to “subsidize state and local efforts to do childcare and bring down the cost to $20 a day,” which — and here’s a spoiler for you — Biden didn’t seem to recall making.
“Biden seemed befuddled,” Whipple’s book states. “‘Well, that just seems like a big spending program,’ he said.”
Klain (to be fair, quoting himself): “No, sir. It brings down costs for people. It’s responsive to inflation. It will bring more people into the workforce. It’s good economics. And you know this is something you’re for.”
However, “Biden didn’t want to talk about it,” and take two hardly went any better.
Whipple writes that “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,’ he said. ‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.”
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” he adds. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
Now, please do keep in mind that this is Ron Klain on Ron Klain, who I imagine thought himself coming off rather well here by predicting it was a disaster but still being a loyal soldier until the end. Indeed, Klain tells of the news of Biden’s retreat from the presidential race on July 21 as a “gut punch.”
“Jeff, that’s too bad,” he told Jeff Zients, his replacement as chief of staff at the White House. “I think that’s a mistake. I think this was an avoidable tragedy.”
Of course it was an avoidable tragedy … if Ron Klain and others had stopped propping President Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldier up after the 2020 win and made him quit while he was ahead. They didn’t, and Whipple has — at least from the reports we’ve received and the excerpts from Klain — made all the president’s men look like fabulists who managed to even deceive themselves.
Oh well. Whipple’s take reminds me a bit of Janet Malcolm’s famous opening to her nonfiction masterpiece, “The Journalist and the Murderer”: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns — when the article or book appears — his hard lesson.”
And now, at long last, Ron Klain and others will apparently learn their hard lessons via an insider who, just a few years ago, was basically writing book-length campaign advertisements for their boss and his administration.
Indeed, Klain is taking issue with how he’s being portrayed by the media, shocker of shockers: “I think the framing is wrong,” he told Politico via text after the excerpts were released. “My point wasn’t that the president lacked mental acuity … He was out of it because he had been [sidelined], not because he lacked capacity.”
Righty-o, Ron. And this won’t be the last time some former Bidenista complains about “wrong framing” or something of the sort. Rest assured, it couldn’t happen to a better bunch of people — and to think, it’ll only keep happening again and again since the Now the Truth Can Be Told™ tomes are coming at us like guns in an Obama-era gun-walking operation: fast and furious.
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