THE BIDEN BOOK DELUGE: The race to shape Joe Biden's legacy is on. The former president's extended orbit is bracing for a steady march of no fewer than four books dropping over the next few months that promise to excavate and relitigate not only the historic 2024 presidential campaign but the former president's own physical and mental condition before dropping out.
Biden allies are already prebutting some of those books' authors, challenging their framing and questioning their fact-checking approach in an attempt to protect the former president's image. Dozens of former and current Biden aides have engaged on the books, according to a person with visibility into the process. Biden allies seem to be defining a satisfactory fact-checking process as one that includes readouts of dates, people, memos and meetings mentioned and a chance for Biden world to respond, item by item.
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Starting Tuesday, the crush of books will begin with Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes' "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House" ($32). Already, the duo have produced reporting that depicts Biden's decline in vivid detail, including that he forgot the identity of one of his 2020 rivals and that Democratic officials had "hush-hush talks" to game out Biden's withdrawal as early as 2023, according to an excerpt in The Guardian.
There's also a book by Chris Whipple which whitewashes the Biden camp and the media from all responsibility, claiming they "believed what they wanted to believe" so nothing to see here folks.
Then comes Fake Jake Tapper's sudden realization that you can judge someone as being senile despite not having a medical degree and specialization in neurology and gerontology:
Biden aides who participated in the reporting of that book, according to the person familiar, were shocked to read the "cover-up" framing on the book jacket, as such framing wasn't used explicitly in some of the interviews facilitated by Biden handers, this person claimed. They say while Thompson and Tapper openly grappled with Biden's age prior to the book's release, allegations of a cover-up or conspiracy broke new ground.
Asked about this, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson told Playbook: "Starting after Election Day, Jake and Alex began working on 'Original Sin' and found people post-election much more willing to talk candidly than they had been. Jake and Alex interviewed more than 200 people to figure out just what went behind the scenes of the Biden White House, conducting an extensive reporting and fact-checking process, including with former President Biden's team. We're not going to discuss who participated but stay tuned for what they discovered."
Couldn't have reported any of this before the election, huh, Fake Jake
Some former Biden aides don't expect the books to make much of a splash. They're betting amid the tumult of Trump's second term, Biden's legacy could look better. "Our attitude is the focus is on 'How can you help?' and most of his alumni are," a former Biden adviser told Playbook. "There will be [book] parties in D.C., but we're also going to move onto the next Signalgate in 30 seconds."
Signalgate >>> Having a Senile Mental Incompetent as Fake President for Four Years
Still, that may be wishful thinking from Biden world. "The next six weeks will be rough for the entire Biden family, because they're going to be the primary focus (and likely villains) in all of these books," said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran who worked for Biden Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Ed Driscoll excerpts some of these non-bombshell revelations at Instapundit.
Biden's close advisor -- and suspected Shadow President for most of Biden's fake term -- Ron Klain knew that Biden was unfit.
Ron Klain, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden known for his intense loyalty, is insisting he "never doubted" Biden's mental fitness -- as a new book describes Klain's distress ahead of Biden's dismal June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.
In "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History," author Chris Whipple writes that Klain viewed Biden, then 81, as "out of it" and even "half-seriously" worried that Biden thought he was "president of NATO."
"I never doubted the president's mental acuity," Klain told The Post Wednesday after a report on Whipple's book was published by the Guardian.
"He had become singularly focused on foreign policy and detached from Democratic allies in the pursuit of GOP support on Ukraine and Israel," Klain said of his impressions of the 46th president.
"He thought that being a great foreign policy president was enough."
It's still bitterly funny that Biden, often called the man who was wrong about every major foreign policy question of the 20th century, had that Old Man Vanity of believing himself to be some kind of wise man of world relations.
I think he believed this because everything with foreign policy is 1, ideology and 2, wild-ass guessing. It's hard to be proven wrong in foreign policy -- which is how Biden avoided coming to this conclusion despite always being wrong.
It's a sketchy field where idiots can think themselves profound thinkers. People like George W. Bush, for example.
This is from the whitewash "they believed what they wanted to believe book:"
"[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted," Klain said.
"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, Whipple writes, "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," Klain said. "Domestic political leaders don't really care what [French President Emmanuel] Macron and [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz think."
More from Whipple's book, as quoted by The Guardian:
According to Klain, it turned out that Biden "didn't know what Trump had been saying and couldn't grasp what the back and forth was"; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying "these guys say I'm doing a great job as president so I must be a great president"; "didn't really understand what his argument was on inflation"; and "had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job".
As described by Klain to the reporter Chris Whipple, at one point Biden had an idea.
"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."
See Ed Driscoll at Instapundit for more about "President Klain."