Joe Biden’s former chief of staff is disputing the portrayal of his remarks about the former president’s preparedness for last year’s disastrous campaign debate with Donald Trump, telling POLITICO that he blames the president’s senior aides — not Biden himself — for the debacle that eventually forced him from the race.
“I think the framing is wrong,” Ron Klain said over text after The Guardian described him as painting a “devastating picture” of Biden’s mental and physical state in an interview for a forthcoming book. “My point wasn’t that the president lacked mental acuity … He was out of it because he had been [sidelined], not because he lacked capacity.”
Klain, Biden’s chief of staff for two years who later helped run preparations for the June debate, criticized Biden’s team at the White House for failing to keep the president focused on addressing Americans’ eroding support for his domestic agenda and the economy overall. As a result, Biden struggled on the debate stage to offer a vision for tackling inflation and lay out a second-term agenda.
“He had been isolated from domestic politics by a WH team unplugged from hill Dems,” Klain said via text, allowing Biden – who at the time was managing U.S. involvement in two foreign wars – to become “solely focused on foreign affairs.”
Klain did not specify which of Biden’s close aides he held responsible for those failings.
A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.
Klain’s comments come amid a wave of new books focused on the 2024 campaign that is likely to renew scrutiny of Biden’s mental fitness, his decision to run for a second term and the aborted campaign that set the stage for Trump’s return to power.
The forthcoming accounts include author Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, which includes an interview with Klain. The Guardian on Tuesday characterized Klain as telling Whipple that Biden “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation” and that at one point “he was just extremely exhausted.”
During debate prep, Klain ultimately cut short both of the mock sessions that Biden’s aides had organized due to the president’s fatigue and lack of familiarity with the subject matter. As Biden went on stage with Trump for the June debate, Whipple wrote, Klain feared it would be “a nationally televised disaster.”
Biden’s struggles during the debate — during which he frequently mumbled, garbled his words and failed to articulate the details of core policies — set off panic and fingerpointing within the White House and across the Democratic Party. Biden ended his campaign under pressure three weeks later, leaving his replacement atop the ticket, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, just over 100 days to make her electoral case.
The Guardian’s coverage of Klain’s remarks quickly circulated among former Biden aides on Wednesday, some of whom chafed at the idea Klain was only now disclosing his private concerns about the president’s fitness.
“No hint there was a problem,” said one former Biden official who was in touch with the president’s team on the eve of the debate and granted anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
Others agreed that Biden and his team had badly misjudged the president’s appeal and the mood of the country — but cast Klain as a participant in those errors, rather than an outlier.
“They never had grasp of the moment,” another former Biden aide, also granted anonymity, said of the president’s closest advisers. “They thought people were in love with Biden.”
In an interview, Whipple said that Klain emphasized to him that he believed Biden should have run for reelection and thought he could win and govern effectively for another four years — a sentiment consistent with his fierce defense of Biden in the weeks after the June debate. Klain told Whipple that he still thinks Biden should have stayed in the race even after the debate performance.
But Whipple added that he came away from the entirety of his reporting confident that Klain was “misguided” in those beliefs.
“Ron painted a really devastating portrait of Joe Biden at Camp David during that whole period of debate prep, and I’m not sure he realizes how devastating that portrait is,” Whipple said. “I do report in the book Ron’s unhappiness, disagreement with the way Joe Biden was being managed. But I would invite readers to pick up the book and read his account — not mine — of what Joe Biden was like at the debate prep.”
In texts to POLITICO, Klain did not dispute the accuracy of the quotes included in The Guardian article. But he insisted that his criticisms lay mainly with those around Biden who allowed the president to grow detached from domestic issues and the broader Democratic Party during an intense period that required him to manage the fallout from two foreign wars.
Klain, who during Biden’s first two years spent considerable energy tending to alliances on Capitol Hill before leaving the administration in 2023, said that in Biden’s final year he found the White House “unplugged from hill Dems and singularly obsessed with getting [Republican] support for Ukraine.”
When he called one prominent congressional Democrat after the debate to see if she’d rally behind Biden, she told him: “I haven’t heard from the president in a year.”
