Joe Biden’s former top aide has revealed the president’s deteriorating mental and physical state was noticeable ahead of his disastrous debate against Donald Trump.
Ron Klain, who served as Biden’s White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was “startled” by the president’s condition when he met with him last June to help with debate prep, according to author Chris Whipple’s new book, which was obtained by The Guardian.
Whipple wrote that Klain had “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.”
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Klain told Whipple that the octogenarian president “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was,” going on to say Biden “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation,” and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.”
According to Klain, Biden was “out of touch” with American politics, obsessing instead about foreign leaders and being head of NATO, saying, “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president.”
Biden, who was 81 at the time, apparently deluded himself into believing that looking confused—which drew heavy ridicule online—would be an effective strategy, according to Whipple: “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.‘”
The book states that he struggled to get through debate practice, calling it quits just 25 minutes into the second mock debate. “I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,” he reportedly said before heading off to bed.
Whipple said that as the debate drew closer, Klain feared it would be a “nationally televised disaster.”
On June 27, those fears were realized when Biden delivered a catastrophic debate performance that exposed his devastating mental and physical state to the country.
In the weeks following the debate—which also saw an assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—pressure mounted from some of the Democratic Party’s biggest names for Biden to step aside. Initially defiant, he relinquished the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris on July 21.
At the time, Klain told The Daily Beast he regretted the president’s decision because he believed “he was our best candidate in 2024.”
Klain’s new comments to Whipple suggest, however, that the longtime political adviser and other members of Biden’s team were increasingly aware of the president’s mental and physical deterioration, even as they continued to project outward appearances of confidence in his abilities.
A Biden ally pointed the Daily Beast to past statements that don’t add up with Klain’s assertions in the book, including comments he made after the debate in which he brushed off Biden’s performance as a “bad debate night,” and claimed that the president had “done well” in the practices.
Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, will be published next week.
