Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon documents leading Democrats’ secret concerns about former President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
From the moment Biden shuffled on stage at the CNN debate and bragged about beating Medicare in June 2024, there has been a steady stream of revelations about all the Democrats who were (privately) concerned or even shocked by the extent of Biden’s cognitive decline since taking office in 2021. They didn’t say anything at the time, obviously, because they didn’t want to anger the president—a notoriously vindictive narcissist—and they didn’t want to help Donald Trump by validating his attacks on Biden’s fitness for office. Two recently published books—Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple—shed even more light on the Democratic Party’s abject failure to stop Biden from running for reelection, even though many believed he was too old and cognitively impaired to serve another four years. …
… 2021
1) Biden “rambled far off topic, telling unrelated stories about his days in the Senate” during a September 2021 meeting at the White House with Democratic aides and lawmakers, Allen and Parnes reported in Fight. “Some wrote it off as a sentimental trip down memory lane, while others took the departure from talks about his sweeping economic proposal as evidence that he was losing his grip.”
2022
2) In the summer of 2022, Jill Biden met with potential donors in Boston, where Bain Capital’s chairman, Joshua Bekenstein, suggested the president “could leave public life proud of a one-term legacy,” and urged Biden to “give other Democrats time to get in the race” by announcing his intention not to run again, according to a New York Times report published earlier this year. Bekenstein had been “under the impression that Mr. Biden had promised to be a one-term candidate” on account of his age. The first lady “listened but did not reply.”
