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The Biden White House reportedly jumped through hoops to hide President Joe Biden’s diminishing cognitive state.

So much so, according to an exclusive report from the Wall Street Journal, that when First Lady Jill Biden’s then-press secretary “accidentally” touted the fact that she’d held more campaign events than her husband, he was quickly rebuked and forced to correct himself.

This was one of many steps that were taken to “manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office,” the Journal notes.

Another step taken was telling White House visitors to keep their meetings with the president “focused.”

“Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members …  were infrequent or grew less frequent,” according to the Journal. “Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, top advisers were frequently placed into roles typically befitting the president.

And then there were the gatekeepers — administration officials dedicated to controlling what did or didn’t happen in the president’s presence.

“There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him, and limits around the sources of information he consumed,” the Journal notes.

One individual who witnessed the gatekeeping described it as “hand-holding.” There was a lot of that.

“While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him,” according to the Journal.

“At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble,” the reporting continues.

This “protective culture,” as the Journal calls it, started during the COVID pandemic.

“His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him,” the Journal notes. “But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.”

The problem is that, while technically protecting the president, this “protective culture” also damaged him by alienating him from “cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees,” and even the American people themselves.

In fairness, the strategy worked — or at least it did up until the infamous June 27th debate in which President-elect Donald Trump decimated the president.

But inside the White House, the president’s declining mental state became evident “in just the first few months of his term.”

“Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes,” the Journal notes.

This prompted them to, as noted earlier, request that visitors keep their meetings short and focused.

“Ideally, the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning,” the Journal reported, citing more anonymous testimony. “His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden.”

Not that the strategy appeared to work…

Meanwhile, if and when the president experienced a so-called “off day,” officials rushed to scrap any scheduled meetings.

“On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled,” according to the Journal.

“He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” a former aide recalled the official saying.

This also happened in 2021, when then-House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith tried to talk to the president about the risks inherent in the then-upcoming Afghanistan withdrawal but was denied.

“The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said of the denial. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

Vivek Saxena
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