A report released this week alleged that President Joe Biden did not begin preparing for his debate with former President Donald Trump until after 11 a.m. and consistently made time for an afternoon nap each day.
“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” The New York Times reported.
The report highlighted instances where Biden made errors regarding military aid to Ukraine, experienced a moment of freezing at a Juneteenth event, displayed confusion at a D-Day anniversary event in France, and even struggled to recall the name of his own secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. Additionally, the age of the 81-year-old president was a contributing factor. According to The Times, the White House decided to shorten Biden’s debate preparation by a few days before the Thursday event “to allow him to recuperate” following a couple of European trips.
“Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals,” the Times reported. “The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process.”
According to Carl Bernstein on CNN, individuals who chose to remain anonymous and are close to Biden claim to have witnessed “15 or 20 occasions in the last year and a half” similar to his behavior during the recent presidential debate. This behavior included appearing vacant, having difficulty enunciating his words, and appearing confused.
“These are people, several of them who are very close to President Biden who loved him, have supported him and among them are some people who would raise a lot of money for him. And they are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” he said.
“And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters incidentally who have witnessed some of them,” said the renowned journalist who built his reputation while working alongside fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to uncover the Watergate scandal.
The octogenarian veteran journalist asserted that his informants alerted then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain to situations in which the president had “lost his train of thought” and was unable to regain it over the previous year.
“There was a fundraiser at which he started at the podium. And then he became very stiff, according to the people there, as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis,” Bernstein said. “This was a year ago almost exactly at the old Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue. And he became very stiff and a chair had to be brought for him to do the latter part of the event.”
“I think that what these folks are saying and have been saying for a while is, ‘Yes, he’s great when we see him, as we have tonight. But he also has these inexplicable moments that we’re very concerned about and you, Ron Klain, and the First Family, we need to talk about this.’ And they’ve been pushed back repeatedly whenever it’s been brought up,” he continued.
