President Joe Biden’s former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki “never saw” warning signs that the president’s mental acuity was dwindling, she insisted on a podcast this week.
“I never saw that person — not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day — that was on that debate stage,” Psaki said, referring to Biden’s shocking debate performance against President Donald Trump in June 2024.
“I’m not a doctor, aging happens quite quickly. Were things that people saw during that period of time that were similar to that or would’ve been in a category of that? I don’t know, possibly and all these books are gonna tell us,” she added, alluding to a slew of soon-to-be-published tell-all books that will allegedly reveal how Democrats covered up Biden’s mental decline.
Although many Republicans called out Biden’s cognitive decline during his presidency, and especially after his disastrous debate performance on the campaign trail, Democrats waited until Biden left the Oval Office to expose and discuss the former president’s mental acuity.
When asked if White House staffers concealed Biden’s mental decline toward the end of his presidency, Psaki said that “I would like to think they would not be a part of an active ‘let’s hide from the public what we see happening privately,'” but acknowledged that “I don’t know the facts of what was happening privately.”
“While we know there were problematic things behind-the-scenes now in 2023 and 2024, there was an aggressive all-out pitching operation from the right-wing and from the Republicans about Joe Biden’s age and how he was in decline….the majority of which wasn’t true, in 2019-2022,” Psaki added.
In 2020, Biden rejected calls from Republicans to take a cognitive test, telling CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett that, “No, I haven’t taken a test? Why the hell would I take a test?”
“That’s like saying . . . before you got on this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?” Biden asked Barnett.
Republicans sounded the alarm about Biden’s diminishing mental capabilities throughout his presidency. Now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio in 2022 called out the “reality” of a “diminished” Biden, and multiple other GOP politicians called on Biden to prove his cognitive abilities in a test.