Democratic donors were concerned about President Joe Biden’s mental ability to serve a second term long before he dropped out of the race in July, according to a book.
These donors pointed to Biden’s “frighteningly awful” appearances in June 2023, per Mediaite.
The concerns came to light in journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “War.”
There were many events in June of last year when Biden’s behavior left his Democratic allies if he should seek another term.
Woodward wrote about one such event, stating,“The first fundraiser hosted by Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft, at his home in Los Gatos on June 19, was attended by 38 guests, including some of the most serious Democratic donors in the valley. The event raised $2.7 million for Biden’s re-election fund.”
“Guests, however, said that Biden was ‘frighteningly awful.’ It was ‘like your 87-year-old senile grandfather’ wandering around the room, saying to women guests, ‘your eyes are so beautiful,’” Woodward wrote.
Biden, who was 80 at the time, flew in from Washington earlier that day and appeared to be tired.
“He could not wait to sit down and only took two pre-arranged questions,” one onlooker said.
It was a different story later that same day when Biden was “energetic” and “wouldn’t sit down for two hours.”
However, a week later, there were “troubling signs of decline” during a fundraiser in Maryland.
“And after a small ‘meet the president’ fundraiser attended by about 20 people at the home of philanthroposts Susie and Michael Gelman in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on June 27, 2023, guests described their interactions with Biden as ‘painful,’” Woodward wrote.
“‘He never completed a sentence,’ said Bill Reichblum, cofounder and president of Liberties Journal Foundation, who attended with his wife and father-in-law, a former U.S. ambassador to Romania,” Woodward wrote.
Woodward’s book continued, quotation Reichblum:
“’He would start to talk about something, jump somewhere else. He told the same story three times in exactly the same way and it meandered so much. … It was striking.
‘Frankly, my impression was there were times,’ Reichblum said, ‘it was as though we didn’t exist. He was just rambling and talking as to what came into his head.’ Biden seemed to Reichblum like an elderly grandparent or a parent who talks and talks but ‘makes no sense.'”
“I would learn the significance of these fundraisers as early markers of Biden’s decline only a year later, in June 2024,” Woodward wrote.
