Former Biden aide describes him as "fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged: before the June debate

Former White House chief of staff the execrable Ron Klain revealed that President Joe Biden was "fatigued, befuddled and disengaged" before his debate with President Donald Trump in June, according to a new book.

Well, folks, the cat’s out of the bag, and it’s not a pretty sight. 

According to Chris Whipple’s [no relation to the Charmin toilet paper guy] upcoming book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, our former fearless leader Joe Biden was less “commander-in-chief” and more “nap-time-in-chief” during his final days in the game. 

Whipple dishes out some juicy details in an excerpt published by The Guardian, and it’s a doozy.

Picture this: Biden’s first sit-down with his then-chief of staff Ron Klain at Aspen Lodge, the presidential cabin retreat. Klain, an execrable Biden loyalist who stuck with him from 2021 to 2023 and even helped prep him for that train wreck of a June debate against Trump, walks in expecting a strategy session. Instead, he finds Biden looking like he just stumbled out of a week-long Netflix binge. 

“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” Whipple writes, Klain “was startled. He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” Yep, while the campaign was circling the drain, Joe was apparently channeling his inner lifeguard. Nobody was there to rub his leg hairs however.

Whipple doesn’t pull punches. “The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” he writes. Klain, watching this slow-motion car crash, reportedly thought the Trump debate would be “a nationally televised disaster.” 

Spoiler alert: he wasn’t wrong. 

So, the team scrambled to set up two mock debates to get Biden in fighting shape. How’d that go? First one was supposed to last 90 minutes, but Klain yanked the plug after 45. “The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject,” Whipple notes. “All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs. He had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term.” 

Infrastructure? Jobs? Joe, the election wasn’t a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Second mock debate? Even worse. “Twenty-five minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day,” Whipple writes. Klain recalls Biden whining, “‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad. I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.” 

Sleep it off, champ—meanwhile, Trump’s out there swinging like it’s the ninth inning. Klain tried to nudge him in the right direction, but Biden was having none of it, getting cranky when anyone dared suggest he step up his game and maybe open his eyes.

Whipple’s not just spilling tea here; he’s tipping over the whole pot. In a chat with Politico, he says Biden’s inner circle was less “cover-up” and more “fog of delusion.” “I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story,” he told them. “I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.” 

Ouch. That’s not a staff; that’s a support group.

The Biden camp’s gone radio silent—no surprise there. But Whipple’s book isn’t the only one peeling back the curtain on this mess. You’ve got The Hill’s Amie Parnes and NBC’s Jonathan Allen dropping their own 2024 tell-all, with Allen claiming Obama was pulling strings to keep Kamala Harris off the ticket. 

Then there’s CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson with Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, hitting shelves in May. Sounds like 2025’s shaping up to be the year of “What the heck happened to Joe?”

So, there you have it—Biden’s last hurrah, as told by the folks who watched him shuffle off the stage. If this is what “rebuilding America” looks like, I’d hate to see the demolition phase. Stay tuned, patriots; the bookshelf’s about to get a lot heavier.

There was never a "build back better" by Biden. Just a pant-load of promises.

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