A Conversation With Chuck Schumer About His Doomsday at the White House: How he’s Done? What he did with him, and what he had to do

His pollsters did not think that when I talked to them more than once. When Chuck Schumer finally has the conversation with Biden in which he says that he thinks Biden should drop out. He says, “I’ve talked to your pollsters. You have a 5% chance of winning. And Biden did not know that because all the polling was interpreted through the spinmeisters around him, Donilon and [Steve] Ricchetti, and Biden’s shocked to hear that. When I talked with one of the pollsters about that story, 5%, he said it was probably more like 1%.

He is still thinking that. He still thinks he could have won. He went on The View to prebutt this book, we think. And he was asked about that. And he said, “Well, look, I still got 7 million more votes than Donald Trump.”

“He can do it. He is a game day performer. He will do it. Everybody wrote him off in 2008 and then he became the best vice president in history. After everybody wrote him off, he beat Donald Trump. And he’s the only one that’s ever beaten Donald Trump. And that theology took root. It’s the theology of the President of the United States. Who is the one to challenge that?

And he says in one of his memoirs, “Get up” was what his father used to say to him. That’s how you measure a man, the ability to get up. That became a theology, not just a mythology. Skeptics were not allowed like any theology. And that is the inner circle of Biden.

He has had a remarkable ability to get up after being knocked to the floor by fate, whether it’s having a debilitating stutter or the horrific tragedy that took the life of his wife and daughter or having two brain aneurysms etc., etc.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote a book about President Biden’s decline, cover up, and his disastrous choice to run again. It chronicles Biden’s decline over his time in the White House, as well as efforts by his top staff to keep that decline hidden from voters.

The official said that they didn’t realize the full extent of the decline. You also saw the schedule become much tighter and more restricted.

Source: This new book explores how Biden’s inner circle kept his mental decline from voters

Biden’s Inner Circle Keeping His Mental Decline from Voters: A New Approach to Exploring the Coverup of the White House

Thompson said something. The one top aide who left the White House said that they intentionally shielded him from other members of the administration, other members of the cabinet, other senior White House officials. The inner circle became smaller and smaller.

You were talking about the structure of the cover up. He’s giving speeches. He’s appearing in public. He’s doing his job as president. And yet, as you reported, there is a concerted effort to wall him off. What specifically was that circle of aides doing?

He didn’t recognize George Clooney. That is somebody who is not only somebody he’d known for more than 15 years, not only somebody that he had had serious conversations about Darfur with, not only somebody that had raised millions of dollars for him and was co-hosting that very fundraiser. He’s also one of the most recognizable people in the world. So, I’m talking about that. I am talking about the non-functional, I- cannot-articulate-a- sentence Biden that we saw at the debate.

Source: This new book explores how Biden’s inner circle kept his mental decline from voters

Why Joe Biden hasn’t won a presidential election since 1972? Explaining that to the media and the aging of Biden’s office

We’re talking about your inability to have a conversation. You can’t come up with names that you should have when you are ready.

Tapper: I would describe it as unable to come up with the names of top advisers or close friends. We’re all human, I would say. We all forget names. We all lose our train of thought. We all witness that in people who are aging.

Last week, a spokesperson from Biden’s office said, “We’re still waiting for someone, anyone to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.”

Thompson: If it wasn’t a cover up, then why were so many people surprised by the debate? The interviews with over 200 people show that there were two Bidens, one functioning and one non- functioning. That goes all the way back to 2019. But he was almost always functioning Biden.

The inner circle thinks that he could have done well if he had won, and that he could have been in office until January 2029. It’s not real at this point. I mean, we can see it. We talked to a top Democrat who saw how he didn’t seem like he was doing well. He wasn’t sure what was going on. This is a guy we’ve seen in public. He’s been in public life since 1972. So, we have seen him age.

I mean, we had all seen him aging. We had all seen him tripping and misspeaking. We had all seen evidence of decline, but the Biden team, family and senior advisors were telling everybody, not just media and not just the public, but also Democratic donors and members of Congress: “He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s fine.”

The First Four Years of Joe Biden’s Obsolescence: How Many Years Did They Spend in the White House? A Conversation with Joe Tapper and Tim Thompson

Tapper: Dana Bash, my co-moderator, and I had these iPads so that we could write to the people in the control room, because obviously we can’t talk to them and there was only one or two commercial breaks. “Holy Smokes” was written when he said, “We finally beat Medicare.” I just couldn’t believe it.

The announcement that Biden has cancer that has spread to the bone came just as his personal office said that he will be writing a book. Biden, 82, was seen for further tests last week after a finding of a prostate nodule.

On Thursday, Tapper and Thompson appeared on All Things Considered to talk about the process of writing the book and why they thought now was the right time to publish it.

What’s the issue? At one point, a White House desk steps away from the Oval Office was occupied by Donilon, and he was one of Biden’s closest aides.

The year is 2019 and presidential hopeful Joe Biden is on a campaign swing in Iowa. During the event, Biden struggles to remember the names of one of his aides, Mike Donilon.

Instances of Biden’s decline make up big chunks of “Original Sin.” In 2019, during a bus tour in Iowa, Biden struggled to remember the name of Mike Donilon, a campaign strategist and White House adviser who had worked with him for nearly four decades. In March 2020, Biden forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be true. All men and women are created by the same thing. One day in the White House in 2022, he could not summon the names of his national security adviser (Jake Sullivan, whom he called Steve) and his communications director (Kate Bedingfield, whom he called Press), both of whom were standing near him. At a Hollywood fund-raiser in 2024, Biden didn’t know who George Clooney was and had to remind himself of who he was.

It is not certain when Biden’s diminishment began, only that there were signs for many years and that they worsened around periods of family turmoil. The president’s oldest son died in 2015, which began it in earnest. “Beau’s death wrecked him,” one senior White House aide tells the authors. Part of him died and did not come back after Beau died. The legal troubles of the Biden family included the collapse of a 2023 deal on tax and gun charges, as well as an “inflection point” where the president suddenly and steeply declined.

Tapper and Thompson have numerous examples to report in advance of Biden’s performance in the debate with Trump on June 27, 2024. “What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly,” Tapper and Thompson write. It was not a cold and not someone who was unprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired.”