The chief of staff knew the risks his party was running by renominating Biden, according to a new behind-the-scenes book.
Travel back with me to January 2023. Something called “bathleisure” was the fashion trend of the age. Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” topped the charts, and Netflix’s original movie You People, a woke reimagining of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, streamed to an inexplicably large number of households. And in the White House, Jeff Zeints’s assumption of the chief of staff role from Ron Klain produced a minor revolt among staffers who described themselves, without any apparent self-consciousness, as “Klainiacs.” It was an embarrassing time.
Our present may be no less mortifying, but we are blessed insofar as the press has no incentive to soft-pedal, massage, or cover up the humiliations to which we’re subjected on a semi-regular basis. Now, with sufficient distance from the Biden administration, the truth can finally be told — albeit only in exchange for a hefty book advance.
Authors have begun publishing long-anticipated behind-the-scenes looks at how the 46th president’s political operation managed its decrepit principal. The conclusion that observers are likely to draw from their reflections is that Klain was not the deft political maneuverer his acolytes made him out to be.
For example, Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History reveals that, despite his perfunctory public statements to the contrary, Klain knew the risks his party was running by renominating Biden.
An excerpt via The Guardian discloses Klain’s true thoughts as he settled into his new role as informal campaign adviser ahead of 2024’s presidential debates. Klain is said to have been “startled” by how the president seemed “so exhausted and out of it.” Biden’s former chief of staff expressed exasperation at “how out of touch with American politics he was,” and how difficult debate preparation was for a president who couldn’t manage to soldier through even half of a 90-minute practice debate.
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple writes. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.” It was, but the spectacle might have been avoided if Klain and those in his orbit hadn’t kept their concerns to themselves. Today, we’re expected to believe that Klain not only foresaw the disaster Democrats were courting but did his utmost to avoid it:
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.”
Indeed, according to Whipple, Klain tried to communicate to the president what his reelection message should be and even the policies he should support — an initiative that reportedly encountered thoughtless resistance from the infirm president.
Klain objects to the author’s “framing” of his conduct. “My point wasn’t that the president lacked mental acuity,” he told Politico in his own defense. “He was out of it because he had been [sidelined], not because he lacked capacity.” That line strains credulity, but no more than Klain’s unconvincing defenses of the president’s cognitive faculties ahead of the debate that scuttled Biden’s political career.