The White House chief of staff in the first two years of the Biden administration who returned to help Joe Biden prepare for his disastrous 2024 debate with Donald Trump said the former president was “out of it” and worried that Biden thought he was “president of NATO.”
In “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” set for release April 8, author Chris Whipple wrote that Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff from 2021-23, was “startled” when he arrived at Camp David to help with debate preparation, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
“He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it,” Whipple wrote, adding Klain was alarmed by Biden’s behavior before the debate.
“We sat around the table,” Klain told Whipple, who is best known for his 2017 book “The Gatekeepers” about the role of the chief of staff, according to the Post.
“[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted,” Klain said. “And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.”
Klain, Whipple wrote, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the U.S.”
“He just became very enraptured with being the head of NATO,” Klain said.
Klain, fellow aides and visitors, including film mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, tried to get Biden into shape. Two mock debates were organized, focusing on domestic policy, The Guardian reported Wednesday.
“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45,” Whipple wrote. “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.”
Klain said Biden grew irritable, saying he would not make promises as he would be criticized for failing to deliver.
But Whipple wrote that “25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. ‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,’ he said. ‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.”
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple wrote. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
The debate was so bad that Biden buckled under pressure about three weeks later and decided to withdraw from the race, with Vice President Kamala Harris installed as the Democrat nominee.
“I never doubted the president’s mental acuity,” Klain told the Post on Wednesday. “He had become singularly focused on foreign policy and detached from Democratic allies in the pursuit of GOP support on Ukraine and Israel. He thought that being a great foreign policy president was enough.”
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