Democratic lawmakers and donors were apoplectic following former President Joe Biden’s debate flop that eventually forced him to suspend his campaign, with some senior party operatives questioning “who the hell is running the country,” according to a new book on the 2024 race,
Biden’s closest advisers watched the June 27, 2024, fiasco from a greenroom at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, where the debate was held — and former White House chief of staff Ron Klain knew right away the night was a “disaster,” write Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper in their forthcoming tome “Original Sin.”
Just 11 minutes into the showdown, Biden fumbled a question about the national debt by uttering a non sequitur — “We finally beat Medicare” — and later lost his train of thought while trying to defend his record on immigration.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” former President Donald Trump famously fired back. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Thompson and Tapper, who co-moderated the debate with CNN colleague Dana Bash, write that “it didn’t seem as if Biden had any idea how bad his performance was, though he did say, ‘Sorry about my voice; I have a cold.’ … Jake didn’t know what to say and attempted to make small talk with [Jill Biden] by showing her that he was wearing [Philadelphia] Phillies cuff links.
“Senior Democrats who had done work for Biden in 2024 later told us that they had watched the debate and wondered: Just who the hell is running the country?”
Ex-Biden senior adviser Mike Donilon argued that Biden was “bad but [the performance was] nothing they couldn’t handle.”
But other Democrats from coast to coast were pulling their hair out as the incumbent spoke in a soft, raspy voice and struggled to make his case for re-election.
“This is a f–king disaster,” said former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki, who canceled a TikTok livestream after growing “speechless” at Biden’s incoherent and halting performance.
Psaki worried about both Democrats’ chances down-ballot as well as her former boss’s health, as Biden continued to cough throughout the debate, according to Thompson and Tapper.
Around 50 House Democrats were also gathered that night for a watch party in DC following weeks of their leadership defending Biden — only to begin “panicking” within a few minutes of the debate kicking off.
“I just lost my job,” one lawmaker griped to House Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.).
“What just happened is not acceptable,” another Dem fumed to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). “Something has to be done.”
At Biden campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., staffers gasped and one said the sight of the 81-year-old president grasping for his lines left them feeling “like we’d all been punched in the stomach.”
Biden Victory Fund finance chair Chris Korge was even more blunt during an Atlanta watch party the same night with DNC chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez.
“We are totally f–ked,” Korge reportedly said. “This is over. It’s all over.”
In Los Angeles, Hollywood donors, Democratic governors and second gentleman Doug Emhoff crowded the Holmby Hills home of former US Ambassador to Spain James Costos for a debate viewing — billed as a Biden fundraiser — that quickly went south.
“We are f–ked!” director Rob Reiner erupted a few minutes into the gathering before taking his anger out on Emhoff: “We’re going to lose our f–king democracy because of you!”
Vice President Kamala Harris was apparently “surprised” at the panic while monitoring the debate from a conference room at the Fairmont Century Plaza, minutes away from where Reiner was venting at her husband.
Having booked several post-debate interviews, she got heated with CNN’s Anderson Cooper while defending Biden’s “strong finish” at the forum — and later dished to her aides that the “motherf–ker” hadn’t treated her “like the damn vice president of the United States,” according to the book.
“He was a very different person on the stage four years ago when — when you debated him. You must — I mean, that — that’s certainly true, is it not?” Cooper protested at one point.
“I got the point that you’re making about a one-and-a-half-hour debate tonight,” Harris seethed in an apparently unscripted response. “I’m talking about three and a half years of performance and work that has been historic.”
First lady Jill Biden eventually took the stage at a watch party near the CNN studio in Atlanta to try to tamp down speculation about his fitness — but ended up making the situation worse by showering him with “infantile praise,” Thompson and Tapper write.
“Joe, you did such a great job!” Jill Biden said, in an awkward moment that she later would admit looked “terrible.”
“You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”
When he took the mic, Biden dug himself in deeper by claiming to quote from a John Wayne movie to call Trump and his supporters “lying, dog-faced pony soldiers” — something the actor had never uttered.
Asked last week on “The View” whether he and his team hid his cognitive decline from the public, Biden defiantly replied: “They are wrong, there’s nothing to sustain that.”
“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” will be available May 20.
