Last June, as President Joe Biden sequestered himself in the presidential retreat at Camp David to prepare for a crucial first debate against challenger Donald Trump, one of his top advisers noticed that something was off.
Though Biden had been a voracious political animal for decades, he didn’t know details about what Trump had been saying about him on the campaign trail. At one point the president left debate prep and “shuffled out the door to the pool,” where he “sank into a lounge chair and fell asleep,” according to Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who helped to run his debate preparation efforts.
Biden, who at 81 was the oldest person ever to hold the presidency, seemed “befuddled” by discussion of his own domestic agenda. Klain was “struck by how out of touch with American politics he was.”
This account comes from “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” a book by journalist Chris Whipple published in January. It’s one of several new books about the 2024 campaign that at least partly address the question now at the center of assessing Biden’s legacy: What was the true state of his mental faculties while he served as president?
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