Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2028 are scrambling to clean up comments defending former President Joe Biden’s evident cognitive decline during his 2024 reelection bid.
New details are emerging about the extent of Biden’s failing mental acuity in office and the coordinated effort to conceal his decline. A host of 2028 Democratic hopefuls are now trying to distance themselves from comments they made in 2024, downplaying concerns about the president’s health and cognitive abilities.
Many Democrats have defended their support for Biden, claiming they were unaware of his issues, despite widespread public scrutiny of the former president’s decline as far back as the 2020 campaign.
“As a governor in a state halfway across the country … I was busy working,” Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one of the co-chairs of Biden’s reelection campaign, said to CNN on Thursday. “I didn’t see the president frequently. And I can tell you, I can’t speak to that directly.”
Despite downplaying her interactions with the former president, Whitmer said last year after Biden’s disastrous debate with President Donald Trump that she had the chance to sit with Biden and reiterated her “confidence in him” and that Biden was “ready to go.”
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer defends President Biden on @WagnerTonight.
“I’ve got confidence in him and I’m continuing to support him,” she tells @alexwagner. pic.twitter.com/GujvlTwhHS
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 10, 2024
“I was very frank with the president during his campaign about what I saw were some of the shortcomings,” Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told Politico. “I was very honest with him in a private setting about that.”
In public, however, Shapiro told Democrats on multiple occasions to “stop worrying” about Biden’s electability.
By 2022, Biden was struggling to recall the names of his longtime aides and staff, according to recent reports. Alongside cognitive challenges, his physical health was allegedly deteriorating to the extent that his aides reportedly discussed putting him in a wheelchair, but decided to wait until after the election due to concerns about public perception.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also praised Biden as a “focused and disciplined leader” following the debate, but recently said Democrats “maybe” would have performed better without Biden. “Every time I needed something from him from the West Wing I got it,” he added.
Anonymous Biden aides and cabinet secretaries told a different story, as revealed in a forthcoming book titled “Original Sin” by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios. “For months, we didn’t have access to him. There was clearly a deliberate strategy by the White House to have him meet with as few people as necessary,” one unnamed cabinet secretary revealed to the authors.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut recently remarked he has “no doubt” that Biden suffered cognitive decline during his term in office, according to Politico. In contrast, the senator said in 2023 that there was “no question” that the then-80-year-old Biden was the best candidate for the race and the party’s future.
As early as the spring of 2021, reports indicate that Biden required meetings to be canceled during “off days” when his energy and focus levels were too low. Furthermore, at a March 2022 event, he seemingly forgot that Republican Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski had recently died in a car crash, calling out to her in the audience despite her evident absence.
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California posted on X on Wednesday that the Democrats “must be honest with people about our party’s mistake” after recent reports that Biden “was not in a condition to run for reelection.” However, he tempered his statement by saying, “In my limited public interactions with the President, he appeared coherent.”
In June 2024, Khanna compared Biden to Rocky Balboa, calling him a “fighter” and noting that “Biden’s character is his eloquence.”
Rocky wasn’t the most eloquent in speech. But he was a fighter. His character conveyed his eloquence. Our message: Biden’s character is his eloquence. https://t.co/RzefR2Kite
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) June 29, 2024
“I have always admired Biden’s resilience and the grit he has shown after the loss of his son —and often compared that strength to Rocky. I was a surrogate for the President of my own party whose policies I backed,” Khanna said in a statement to the DCNF. “But obviously we did not have the full picture, and in hindsight it is painfully obvious that President Biden should have made the patriotic decision not to run.”
The offices of Whitmer, Shapiro and Murphy did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment. Buttigieg could not be reached for comment.
Elected officials are not the only ones changing their tune on Biden. Members of the corporate media, including Jake Tapper, co-author of “Original Sin,” have been among the most ardent defenders of the former president’s health against critics.
During a tense exchange with Lara Trump, who criticized Biden’s mental state during the 2020 campaign, Tapper repeated the Biden campaign’s claim that his verbal stumbles were due to a lifelong stutter.
“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” he asked Lara Trump. “It’s so amazing to me- a ‘cognitive decline.’ I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter, and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
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