I had to laugh a little when I read the news that former Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain is claiming, according to a new book, that he was “startled” by the fact that Joe Biden seemed “exhausted and out of it” as he prepped for his fateful debate with Donald Trump in the summer of 2024.
Indeed, as Noah Rothman noted on the Corner this week, Klain claims to have “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.”
According to the new book by Chris Whipple on the 2024 campaign, Biden was “fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged.” Moreover, “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
What’s crazy, of course, is that Ron Klain, the Biden family, powerful Democrats, and their allies in the media were content to try to hide Joe Biden’s decline and deny, deny, deny that it was even happening.
In March 2024 — two months before the debate — Klain was telling the New York Times proudly that Biden was Democrats’ “best option to defeat Donald Trump in 2024” and to “protect our democracy.”
(He also claimed that Biden’s “first priority in picking a vice president was to find someone who would be a partner in governing. There was no question about it.” Ha!)
Of course, here at National Review, we were never afraid to point out the fact that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Way back in the first summer of the Biden administration, in August of 2021, Jim Geraghty wrote a column here at NR bracingly titled, “Something Is Wrong with the President,” which outlined Biden’s decline.
But of course, that was still — in the mainstream press at least — an outrageous and simply unthinkable thought to voice in polite company: Saying such a thing was rude; it was ageist; it was dirty, craven politics.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza responded to Jim’s truth-telling with a column titled, hilariously, “Republicans keep trying to make Biden’s mental capacity an issue.”
Jim, you see, is not a doctor, or a “medical professional.” Thus — according to Cillizza — Jim’s conclusions about Biden’s diminished capacities “must have been based on disagreements with Biden’s approach to Afghanistan. Which, while a totally worthy subject on which to disagree, has zero to do with whether Biden is all there or not.”
Okay, Chris. You’re free to believe that, but here at NR, we’ve always been more interested in the truth as we see it than what’s apparently unthinkable, according to CNN. It’s long been wrongthink to say that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports. For a long time, it was wrongthink to say that the Covid pandemic was likely caused by a lab leak that was subsequently covered up by Communist China. Today, it’s wrongthink to lay out the facts about tariffs.
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