NBC’s Kristen Welker questioned Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., on Sunday about whether former President Biden’s aides mislead the public about the former president’s capacities.
“Do you think that former President Biden’s advisors mislead the American people about the president’s capacities?” she asked.
NBC’s Welker asked about a new book written by author Chris Whipple, in which he details comments from former chief of staff Ron Klain, who said he was “startled” by Biden during debate preparation, and that the president was “fatigued, befuddled and disengaged.”
“It’s hard for me to gauge what the closest advisers of the president were seeing at the time. I can only speak to the interactions that I had with him, which were, you know, in the months leading up to his getting out of the race, largely ceremonial occasions,” Schiff said.
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“He made the decision to get out of the race, I think that was the right decision. The vice president, as the vice president, I think, ran a great campaign, but could not run away from being a representative of the status quo,” he said.
Schiff said the Democratic Party failed to address the economy in 2024 and, in turn, lost the White House.
“The catastrophic damage they’re doing to the economy now is going to cause Trump and Republicans to lose Congress, but both parties going to have to tackle this global challenge to our economy,” he added.
Klain reportedly told Whipple that they prepared for two mock debates during their preparation in June, according to excerpts from his new book, “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.”
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“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject. All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs. He had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term,” Whipple wrote.
Klain, according to Whipple, said the president was irritable as he pushed back on the former chief of staff’s suggestions.
Whipple’s book is one of several coming out this year about the 2024 campaign, one of the most chaotic and unpredictable election seasons in recent history.
The author said in an interview with Politico about his book that many of Biden’s closest aides were in a “fog of delusion” about the former president, and calling it a “cover-up” did not go far enough.
“I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story,” Whipple told Politico on Sunday. “I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”
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