Former President Joe Biden struggled to perform even the basic tasks of a political candidate during his abortive 2024 re-election bid, with even pre-recorded campaign videos junked as “unusable,” according to a bombshell new book about the 82-year-old’s cognitive decline.
According to “Original Sin,” co-authored by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Biden aides tried to limit the 46th president’s exposure “in subtle ways.”
“When a group wanted Biden to tape a five-minute video address to keynote an event, the White House usually responded by saying the video would be one to two minutes,” the authors write. “However, even with the time limitation, Biden often couldn’t make it through one or two minutes without botching a line or two.”
Aides tried to compensate by filming the then-president from multiple angles and using jump cuts, but they couldn’t mask fundamental problems with Biden’s capability.
“The man could not speak,” one person involved in the effort told Tapper and Thompson, who wrote that Biden suffered from an “inability to find words, to remember what he was saying, to stay on one train of thought. Aides would sometimes make the videos in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked … If he was off, editing footage in a way that cast him in the best light would require hours
of work.”
The nadir came in April 2024, when the Biden campaign had packed a friendly audience into a high school gym for a town hall, footage of which was planned to be used in a commercial.
“The campaign was trying to make it look like the president was out there taking off-the-cuff questions from voters in public,” the authors wrote. “But the event was closed to reporters, and the campaign had the full list of questions that people would ask.”
Despite those efforts, Tapper and Thompson reported that Biden had so much “trouble” that “[t]he campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable.
“Some said the problem was that the advance team had failed and the gym’s lighting was terrible. Others admitted that there was a deeper, far less fixable problem: Biden.”
Allies of the president frequently responded to criticisms of his speaking ability by citing a childhood stutter, while critics pointed out that as a senator and vice president, Biden had shown an ability to discourse at length with no hiccups.
Eagle-eyed observers had noticed during the campaign that some videos of Biden featured multiple jump-cuts, including a clip of him challenging Donald Trump to their ill-fated June 27 debate.
“Original Sin” is available now and allies of the former president have pushed back on his depiction in that book as well as other accounts of his administration.
“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” former first lady Jill Biden said on ABC’s “The View” earlier this month.
Biden’s office announced Sunday that he has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that metastasized to his bones.
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