In the lead up to the disastrous June 2024 CNN presidential debate that saw a dazed and confused Joe Biden take on Donald Trump, Democrats insisted the then-81-year-old commander in chief was firing on all cylinders.
Some continued to make those claims even after the American people saw the president’s state with their own eyes, but a bombshell new book suggests White House staffers and top Dems were well aware of Biden’s feebleness well before he took the stage.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of The Fifth Column – Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch – to discuss the explosive revelations and the lengths the left went to to cover for Biden.
The Bombshell Book
Chris Whipple’s new book Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, is billed as a “fly-on-the-wall story of campaign 2024” thanks to access to exclusive and high-profile sources on both sides.
The Guardian obtained an advanced copy of the book, which comes out next week, and revealed former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain is among those who went on the record with Whipple and offered some jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes details of what preceded that infamous debate.
Klain served in the Biden White House from 2021 to 2023 and returned to his campaign last June to oversee debate prep as he had for previous Democratic presidents. Whipple writes that when Klain arrived at Camp David, “he’d never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it.”
Biden was “unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool,” Whipple writes. Things only got worse from there.
Biden apparently pitched an idea for the debate: “If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.’”
That evening, Klain said Biden “was just extremely exhausted,” and he was “struck by how out of touch with American politics he was.” Instead, Biden was “just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders” to the point where Klain and the aides in the room “half-seriously” wondered if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the United States.
Two mock debates were reportedly planned to get Biden into shape, but neither went as planned. “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,” Whipple writes. “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 told Whipple Biden “grew irritable” and said “he would not make promises as he would be criticized for failing to deliver.” The second practice debate lasted just 25 minutes before Biden told the group he was “too tired to continue” and afraid of losing his voice. “I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow,” he reportedly said.
Klain described the president as “fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged” and feared the debate would be “a nationally televised disaster.” His fears came to fruition on June 27 when Klain recalled Biden arrived with just minutes to spare.
Despite Jill Biden praising her husband’s performance, Whipple writes that everyone else around the president could see “something was terribly wrong.” Even Biden’s sister and longtime adviser Valerie Biden Owens was apparently “so angry, she was practically incoherent” after watching the debate.
Biden eventually bowed out of the race on July 21. Despite the truth serum, Klain claimed the news was still a “gut punch.” He told his successor as chief of staff, Jeff Zients, the whole situation “was an avoidable tragedy.”
‘Aggressively Duplicitous’
While Megyn understands why the slow drip of stories about Biden’s decline are finally being told, she wondered what the upside is for someone like Klain to talk at this point.
“They’re all trying to save their own asses by being like, ‘He was a hot mess and I knew,'” she said. “Well, why did you lie to all of us publicly over and over, and how does that save your ass? Why, if you were part of the cover up, would you be so dumb as to grant a bunch of interviews acknowledging you knew? Why wouldn’t you just continue the lie? It’s an interesting question.”
Foster believes there are only two possibilities. “Either he is being aggressively duplicitous here or he is a total moron,” he said. “It does seem binary.” Given Klain’s other comments on Biden’s fitness for office – like when he told Kara Swisher on July 29 that Biden “campaigned very effectively” and was a “tour de force” – he was inclined to believe the former.
In Welch’s view, the honesty is too little too late from Klain. “[Biden’s decline] was not a surprise that suddenly came down from the heavens in the summer of 2024. This is something that… we’d all noticed,” he explained. “The way that you avoid this is that you tell people ahead of time that he is the oldest president in history and he said he was only going to really run to forestall Donald Trump, and you start looking for alternatives. Ron Klain chose not to do this. His tears are delicious.”
Whipple told Politico that the word “cover-up” is “simplistic” when it comes to describing what happened with Biden. “I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that,” he said. “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.”
Moynihan was inclined to agree, though he believes another important stakeholder was complicit in peddling said delusion and denial. “That strikes me as probably true… just from his reporting, but there are two tiers of this,” he noted. “There is the delusion from within the White House, but there is a cover up… from people in the media. That was where the cover up was.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with The Fifth Column by tuning in to episode 1,040 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.