Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein called President Biden’s recent debate performance a “horror show” but indicated it’s far from a one-night issue.
CNN political analyst Carl Bernstein told Anderson Cooper on Monday that several people “very close to” President Joe Biden have been concerned about his “cognitive decline” for more than a year now.
During an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 less than a week after Biden’s disastrous performance in the first 2024 presidential debate, Bernstein revealed:
These are people, several of them, who are very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported him – among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him – and they are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off. That there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year-and-a-half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed, and what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who witness some of them.
The veteran journalist told Cooper, “These people who have supported him, loved him, campaigned for him, see him often say that in the last six months particularly, there has been a marked incidents of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.”
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Bernstein claimed that the unnamed sources had all talked to former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who supervised Biden’s debate prep, about the president’s growing “problem,” but were “pushed back repeatedly” whenever the topic was brought up.
“There have been numerous instances where the president has lost his train of thought [and] can’t pick it up again,” recalled Bernstein. “There was a fundraiser in which he started at the podium, and then he became very stiff, according to the people there, as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis set in.”
According to Bernstein’s sources, Biden suddenly “became very stiff, and a chair had to be brought for him” to finish the event.
Bernstein’s comments come as more and more Democrats have publicly turned on Biden.
On Monday, Kentucky Andy Beshear (D) seemed to promote himself as an alternative candidate to Biden.
Per Mediaite:
“It was a very bad night for the president. But he is still the candidate. Only he can make decisions about his future candidacy, so as long as he continues to be in the race, I support him,” replied Beshear, who notably was not even asked about Biden potentially standing down.
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