Ezra Klein has an interview with Jake Tapper out today, though the interview itself took place a few days ago. Klein opens with what is meant to be a thought provoking question: Was the White House really lying about Biden or did they believe what they were saying? It’s a long conversation but I think Tapper convinces him that, while some in the White House may have been high on their own supply, there were definitely people who knew better. Those people at the top, the Politburo as they were called, were lying to everyone including themselves. [Klein’s comments are bolded below.]
…I’ll tell you that this disaster that happened with Joe Biden running for re-election and then the cover-up of what he was like behind the scenes — what Robert Hur saw — was orchestrated by Joe and Jill and Hunter and Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti. There are other people to a lesser extent, but those five people are the most responsible.
“Cover-up” — that’s the word I want to get at here.
Throughout this whole period, like many political reporters, I am constantly asking people in the White House: How’s Joe Biden in meetings? How’s he doing?
And they all say, to a person — the line you often hear is: He can perform the presidency, but he can’t “perform” the presidency. His communication skills have degraded, but as a decision maker, he’s better than ever.
That kept a lot of people from writing about what was in front of your face. You think: Well, these people are seeing things I’m not. If they tell me he’s good in the meetings — I don’t know if he’s good in the meetings.
So when you say there’s a cover-up, my sense of these people is that this is what they believed — or at least had talked themselves into believing…
Yes, they were lying to themselves. They were lying to others.
But the definition of a cover-up is when you are hiding something that is an ugly fact. And the ugly fact is that the Joe Biden we all saw at the debate on June 27, 2024, did not just step out of nowhere. That was Joe Biden. And that was the logical consequence of what they had been hiding, in a big way, since 2023.
Part of what they were hiding was how little Biden could actually do in the last couple years of his presidency and how much he ceded to others.
One of my conclusions covering the White House was that Biden’s attentional bandwidth was more limited than it would have been when he was 65…So he was extremely engaged on Ukraine, extremely engaged on Israel and Gaza. But his attention to domestic policy seemed, to me, to flag —
A hundred percent…
I think that when it came to domestic policy, he let his first chief of staff, Ron Klain, kind of run things for a while.
Klain was a hero to progressives — and therefore, Joe Biden, in many ways, was a hero to progressives. And that’s one of the reasons, by the way, that the progressives were the very last ones to abandon him — the progressives and the Black Caucus — because they had gotten so much that they wanted from him policy-wise.
Personally, I always sort of wondered how the guy who ran as a moderate Democrat wound up being more woke than Barack Obama in office. And I guess this explains that a bit. On a lot of issues, Biden was barely there, issues like immigration. In light of Biden’s abysmal record on immigration, arguably the worst in US history, this is pretty shocking.
[Sen] Bennet leaves the White House thinking: Well, this is why Biden’s immigration policy is such a mess — he’s not capable of leading the disparate factions in the Democratic Party and in his administration on this.
In fact, there had been a desire to beef up border security at the beginning of the Biden administration, and that faded away. Secretary Mayorkas and others never knew why it just went away. And Bennet’s overall conclusion is this did have an impact on the country.
What happen to plans to beef up border security? No one knew. They just faded away. But now we know it was Biden himself who was fading away and the Politburo around him had a different agenda.
Klein also reveals the calculus behind running an addled Biden for a 2nd term and it’s exactly what we all thought it was a year or two ago.
These are political animals. They were terrified of Donald Trump. And I think that after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the nominee, a lot of people said: Well, this is what we got. This is the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump. So this is what we got to do.
And a lot of members of Congress who saw things and wanted to speak up were told: What do you want? Donald Trump? This is what you want? They were called traitors.
I want you to be more specific, because that isn’t what they were told, in a way.
At least in my experience, they were told: Do you want Kamala Harris?
Finally, there’s a bit about how the media got this so very wrong.
I want to just talk through some of the lessons of all this. One that has been on my mind is how much we in the media prize inside information — when often the truth is just right in front of you…
We have a senior Democrat in the book, in the first chapter, who talks about how he would see what you’re talking about — Biden’s inability to communicate in a way that you would want for a president. And he would call inside people — Donilon, etc. — and they would all say: He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine.
Then after Biden dropped out, this Democrat went to the White House and sat down with Joe and Jill Biden behind closed doors, just the three people. And this Democrat told us: He wasn’t [expletive] fine. Jill had to complete his sentences. He was losing his train of thought. He wasn’t [expletive] fine.
To sum this up in my own words, there were so many Democrats lying about this and participating in a cover up that you were better off just looking at the videos the media dismissed as “cheap fakes” with your own eyes. That’s obviously what a lot of us did and it served us well, much better than waiting on the left-leaning media for scoops that (almost) never came.
