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Showing Original Post only (View all)How Biden's Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President (NYT) [View all]
Last edited Sat Jan 18, 2025, 11:50 AM - Edit history (2)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/us/politics/biden-age.htmlhttps://archive.ph/qXgbp
How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President
“Your biggest issue is the perception of age,” Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime strategist, told him in 2022, according to people who heard him.
By Katie Rogers, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman and Carl Hulse
Jan. 17, 2025 Updated 7:58 p.m. ET
...
Mr. Biden acknowledged the concerns, but the warnings only ignited his defiant, competitive streak. In April 2023, without convening his family or having long deliberations with aides, he announced he was running again.
Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump heads back to the White House, demoralized Democrats debate what might have been had the president bowed out in time to let a younger generation run. Mr. Biden, 82, has at the same time made the extraordinary admission that he might not have made it through a second term. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” he said in an interview with USA Today on Jan. 5.
The president’s acknowledgment has put a new spotlight on his family and inner circle, all of whom dismissed concerns from voters and Mr. Biden’s own party that he was too old for the job. And yet they recognized his physical frailty to a greater degree than they have publicly acknowledged. Then they cooperated, according to interviews with more than two dozen aides, allies, lawmakers and donors, to manage his decline.
They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.
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Zero mention of how the media enables and protects the demented felon and normalizes his fascism
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This isn't about Biden. This is about everyone who helped push him out, trying to legitmize what they did.
Baitball Blogger
Jan 2025
#26
Think it might have made a difference with a legitimate primary. But it just doesn't matter now.
Silent Type
Jan 2025
#7
There will be elections in 2026 and 2028, and Musk didn't change votes. We lost.
Silent Type
Jan 2025
#37
Joe Biden is a very accomplished president. He may have saved America by running in 2020
Martin Eden
Jan 2025
#19
OK, we get it. Joe Biden is old. He walks slower, it happens when you get older. Now lets address trump's craziness
tulipsandroses
Jan 2025
#27
And Democrat leadership wonders why they keep losing elections they should be winning
Seasider
Jan 2025
#35
Yes he is over 80, he walks slower, he talks softer, and may forget things
DemocracyWorks
Jan 2025
#39