Joe Biden’s former chief of staff has opened up about his mental decline.
Ron Klain, who served as Biden’s White House Chief of Staff from 2021 to 2023 and then returned to help him with debate preparation in 2024, is quoted in an upcoming book saying that the president had no idea what was really going on.
According to The Guardian, Klain claimed that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was.”
During debate preparation, Biden reportedly left and fell asleep by the pool.
At one point, Biden had a brainwave.
“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot,” the book states.
”Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.’”
The claims were made in reporter Chris Whipple’s upcoming book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.
In another part of the book, Whittle says that Klain even wondered whether Biden thought he was the president of NATO rather than the United States:
At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, Klain was startled. 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 wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US. ‘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.’
Whittle, meanwhile, believes that calling the behavior of Biden’s staff a “cover-up” is too simplistic.
“I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic,” he said in a recent interview with Politico. “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,” he added. “They believed what they wanted to believe.”
