Bidens top aides denied he was disintegrating asdonors warned prezs aging appearance was fking up campaign: book

President Biden’s top aides denied he was cognitively slipping right up until his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump in June, even as donors warned that his aging appearance was “f–king up’ his re-election campaign, a new book reveals.Members of the Cabinet, National Security Council and other senior advisers found the president “commanding” in briefings and waved off accusations of mental decline as “more of an optics problem,” according to Bob Woodward’s tell-all “War,” out next week.“He’s alert,” claimed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.“Every meeting I went to with President Biden, without fail, he had obviously done his homework.”Maggie Goodlander, a former Biden Justice Department official now running for Congress in New Hampshire, told her husband Jake Sullivan — Biden’s national security adviser — that she “felt the urge to secretly record” the president’s phone calls with Sullivan to dispel rumors of his mental decline.However, even Goodlander admitted that watching Biden’s stumbling television appearances were “harrowing” experiences.Donors were more candid, urging the 81-year-old Biden to not get caught on camera shuffling in and out of the White House — a near-impossible task with the world’s media recording almost every move the president made.“You’re f–king up your campaign,” one Hollywood CEO cautioned Biden after a Silicon Valley fundraiser in May 2024, Woodward recounts.“Every time you get out and walk, people think ‘old,'” the movie mogul said.

“Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re filmed walking.”White House aides had begun to form a bubble around Biden months earlier, before questions of his cognitive acuity mounted in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur’s February report on the president’s “willful” mishandling of classified documents from his vice presidency and Senate days.Hur chose not to prosecute the ...