President Joe Biden’s campaign shared concerns about the candidate’s age in 2024 despite assurances to the contrary in what one former staffer said amounted to “gaslighting” the public.
In an appearance at the Science Institute at American University on Wednesday, Michael LaRosa, former press secretary to First Lady Jill Biden, said the administration downplayed polls showing then-81-year-old Biden lagged behind in the presidential race and that Americans were concerned he was too old to do the job.
“We were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue,” LaRosa told Puck journalist Tara Palmeri, adding that staffers were “scared to death” to let Biden do interviews with the media.
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The remarks came during an exchange in which Palmeri asked LaRosa about Original Sin, a new book by Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN anchor Jake Tapper that chronicles “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.”
“Cover-up to me is a little hard, a little harsh. Every politician, everybody, every human being tries to cover up age,” LaRosa added. “There are some things that are true, I mean, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling. And I will use the term gaslighting because that’s what they were doing—the campaign, former colleagues.”
LaRosa admitted that the campaign “all of a sudden” deemed the polls “meaningless” when they showed former President Biden running behind. The White House then settled on countering that it was “too early” to consider them and that they “don’t mean anything.”
“By denying the data that was out there publicly, by denying the really insightful journalism, you know, they were actually demeaning to a lot of the people,” LaRosa said. “The data denial that really bothered me because we loved polling when we were running because we were always ahead.”
“If you were consuming information, consuming data, and looking at it objectively, then none of it was surprising,” he added.
