White House aides considered getting then-President Joe Biden a cognitive test months before he dropped out of the 2024 election, but decided against it, according to a new book.
The book is titled “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America” and was co-written by Tyler Pager of The New York Times, Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal, and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post. It is set to be released in July.
Biden’s aides were confident that the elderly president would ace a cognitive test, but worried that taking it would only raise more suspicion about Biden’s mental acuity and health, the book says, according to The New York Times.
Discussions around a possible cognitive test for Biden were taking place in February 2024, the same month special counsel Robert Hur released a report on an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. In the report, Hur concluded that Biden’s memory appeared impaired.
“Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023,” the report said. Hur cited Biden’s memory problems in the special counsel’s determination not to bring charges against Biden for mishandling classified information.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report said.
Biden later ended his bid for re-election, catapulting Vice President Kamala Harris into the Democratic nomination after he appeared feeble and, at times, incomprehensible during a debate with then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.
The White House, Democratic lawmakers, and media pundits maintained that Biden’s mind remained sharp until the former president’s debate against Trump. After the debate, there was intense pressure in the media and among Democratic donors for Biden to step aside and let someone else run for president.
Former Biden senior adviser Mike Donilon, who had worked with Biden for decades, told The Harvard Political Review in March that he still believes Biden should be president.
“On the topic of his age, I thought the best answer was going to be performance. I saw him every day. If you watched his farewell address, I think he had as clear and cogent an assessment of where the country is and the threats of the country as anyone’s ever given,” he said. “It was kind of bizarre that, on the one hand, there was this narrative that he was too old for the job when that very day, he was doing something that very few presidents have ever done.”
