Democrats Ignored the Warnings.
By Annie Linskey, Laurence Norman and Drew Hinshaw
June 28, 2024 6:30 pm ET
The loudest public alarm about Joe Biden’s mental acuity came in February with the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, a document he produced after spending five hours interviewing the president that revealed Biden displayed significant memory problems.
Democrats worried. Then most of them followed the president’s lead and dismissed it as partisan hackery. Biden’s closest advisers defiantly beat back suggestions that the 81-year-old president showed signs of decline.
Minutes into Thursday night’s presidential debate, the concerns began gushing into the open.
Yet they had already become increasingly apparent inside Washington’s corridors of power and across the world for months. In interviews, top officials abroad and Democrats said they’ve witnessed other moments where Biden’s behavior concerned them. Some were quickly relieved when Biden appeared to regain his footing. Others were left shaken by the experience. The White House did not immediately provide comment for this story.
European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer. There were real doubts about how Biden could successfully manage a second term but one senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials denied there was any problem in private discussions.
Diplomats described Biden’s performance at the Group of Seven leaders meeting in Italy in June as mixed, with Biden appearing physically frailer than in the past but alert in many of the most important discussions.
June 14, 2024, Italy, Fasano: 14/06/2024. Fasano, Italy. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wishes German Chancellor Olaf Scholz a Happy Birthday alongside US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron on day two of the G7 Summit in Borgo Egnazia (Fasano) in Apulia, Italy. PHOTO: SIMON DAWSON/AVALON/ZUMA PRESS
Biden missed the summit’s dinner party in a medieval castle, an off-camera and less scripted part of the summit when leaders often exchange views most candidly. He was the only G-7 leader to not attend the meal; the White House told reporters in advance he wouldn’t be there because it would be a “jam-packed two days” of meetings. Biden instead held an event with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and had a brief news conference.
The next day, Biden followed through on his plans to forego a Swiss peace summit for Ukraine, to attend a California fundraiser instead, frustrating Ukrainian officials who had organized the conference in Switzerland directly after the G7 in the hope that Biden would come from Italy.
Officials said that Biden’s performance and focus can vary hugely between meetings and even within a meeting. Two senior European officials cited an EU-U.S. summit last October in Washington where Biden had struggled to follow the discussions. Both said that he stumbled over his talking points at several moments, requiring Secretary of State Antony Blinken to intervene and point out the lines he should use.
“The reading in Europe is that this has been an unmitigated disaster,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome and a former adviser to the EU’s foreign-affairs chiefs, referring to Biden’s attempts to reassure voters worried about his age. European officials and prominent commentators, she added, “have been talking about it. It’s something that has been known, always, that his age is his main Achilles heel.”
In the hours after Thursday’s debate, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters that the Democrats have a problem. His Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski obliquely compared the president to the last of Ancient Rome’s Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who by badly mismanaging his imperial succession, sent that civilization into its long decline.
“I was afraid of this. It was to be expected that in a direct confrontation, in a debate, it would not be easy for the president,” said Tusk, who has known Biden for years. Asked what he thought of proposals to replace Biden with another candidate, he added: “They definitely have a problem. The reactions have been unambiguous.”
“The Democrats must switch horses now,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior lawmaker in Germany’s center right main opposition party and the former chair of its parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said on social-media site X. Slovenia’s former Prime Minister Janez Janša said he’d bet months ago that Biden would no longer be on the ballot in November.
Biden’s Blunders and Trump’s Falsehoods: An Annotated Guide to What Went Wrong in the Debate
When Biden was in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day in June, he stumbled. During a bilateral meeting in Paris with Zelensky, Biden spoke so softly that reporters brought in to document the meeting between the two men could not initially hear the American president. Zelensky, a non-native English speaker, could be heard clearly.
During the brief exchange, Biden flubbed when explaining what the Ukranians would do with a new tranche of $225 million in funds that the U.S. was sending. Biden told Zelensky that money was “to help you reconstruct the electric grid.” Officials traveling with the president explained that the money was actually a series of munitions including air defenses that could protect the electric grid, among other targets, and not for rebuilding the electric grid.
Back in Washington for a brief time between his trips to France and Italy, Biden appeared at a Juneteenth concert at the South Lawn. Video footage of the event showed him clapping noticeably out of time to the music. He needed assistance from the person seated next to him when it was time for him to get up.
TOPSHOT – US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrive to sign a bilateral security agreement at the Masseria San Domenico on the sidelines of the G7 Summit hosted by Italy in Apulia region, on June 13, 2024 in Savelletri. Presidents Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky signed a landmark US-Ukraine security deal on Thursday, as the US leader warned Russia’s Vladimir Putin they were “not backing down”. PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Throughout the ups and downs, First Lady Jill Biden has been a strong supporter of her husband’s decision to run and stay in the race, according to two people familiar with the dynamic. Biden’s top aides insist publicly and around various Washington dining room tables that the president is mentally sharp. As recently as May, one aide in frequent contact with the president insisted that there’s been absolutely no change in his performance.
And, when confronted with evidence that Biden is deteriorating, the White House pushes back quite hard, including when the Journal reported earlier this month that Biden showed signs of slipping in negotiations with congressional leaders. In February, before the Hur report was released on the probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents, White House lawyers sought to strip references about Biden’s memory from the report. The White House team of communications officials labeled Hur’s comments on Biden’s memory as “gratuitous” as they expressed relief that he was not recommending criminal charges against Biden.
Donors have for months privately raised concerns about Biden’s lack of spontaneity in settings with his biggest supporters.
At a September 2023 fundraiser in New York, Biden retold the same anecdote twice – leaving at least one attendee shaken and worried about his age. In February, Biden used a teleprompter at a fundraiser in Los Angeles and questions were screened in advance, according to a person familiar with the matter – frustrating some donors who had expected a more free-flowing exchange.
During a May fundraiser in Washington state, Biden appeared to lose his train of thought as he talked about Israel. “The ceasefire would begin tomorrow. It all has to do…you know, we’ve not..anyway, I guess I shouldn’t get into all this about Israel but…”
Some major Democratic donors have sat this race out, believing that the ticket might change or that Biden is too old, according to two people familiar with Biden’s fundraising operation. So far the money has come in at such a fast clip that those naysayers have been ignored.
Actor Billy Porter, from left, US Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, and his wife Keeta Floyd during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, June 10, 2024. In 2021, Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as the nation’s newest Federal holiday. PHOTO: TING SHEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
For a while now Biden has been closely managed. Even at donor events done by Zoom back in 2020, questions were closely screened. Over the past year donors have been shocked to see Biden using a teleprompter at fundraising events to deliver a brief stump speech.
Hur, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who interviewed Biden for more than five hours over two days in October, said that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” and that he would come across to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Republicans in Congress have pressed to get recordings of the interview, believing that hearing Biden’s tone and the length of his pauses are important in determining a mental decline.
Biden responded to the report during a news conference in the Diplomatic Reception Room, saying: “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man — and I know what the hell I’m doing.”
—Bojan Pancevski, Siobhan Hughes and Marcus Walker contributed to this article.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com
