Get Off His Lawn: White House Insists Biden 'Tires Younger Aides' With His Extreme Vigor

The President is fine.

Sharp as a tack.

Definitely leading the country.

What you saw last Thursday was simply a bad night from a titan of politics who's literally 'tiring out' his younger aides with his extreme schedule, according to deputy press secretary Andrew Bates.

@MatthewSitman

Yes, this is the official response from the White House following years of ZeroHedge reporting on Biden's mental decline, which in recent months even MSM outlets have begun to admit, and has now spilled out into the open for the world to see following last week's nursing home rec-room performance by the sitting president, who wants to continue as president for another four years when he'll be 86 and surely even sharper.

After all, according to Nancy Pelosi it's actually Trump who has dementia.

Speaking with Axios while the Biden family met at Camp David on Sunday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates insisted: "Not only does the President perform around the clock, but he maintains a schedule that tires younger aides, including foreign trips into active war zones, and he proves he has that capacity by delivering tangible results that pundits had declared impossible."

Except (you know it's bad when...) journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN on Monday that there have been at least 15 occasions in the last 18 months "where the president has appeared like he did at that horror show (his debate performance)," and that in the last six months, there have been a marked cognitive decline that has caused some of his sources to approach Chief of Staff Ron Klain to express concern.

According to Bernstein, in June of 2023 at the Four Seasons in New York, Biden became "Very stiff…almost like a kind of rigor mortis."

Bring out the clowns!

Meanwhile, the White House and the Biden campaign also told Axios that Biden's awful debate performance 'doesn't tell the full story.'

1. Brett McGurk, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, has worked closely with the past four presidents. He's constantly in the Situation Room with Biden, and gets the president's comments and questions back from his nightly prep packet.

•  "If what is being written now about President Biden were true, history would be very different," McGurk told us in a half-hour phone interview. He said Biden's "strategic empathy," wisdom, experience and familiarity with the globe from his years as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are "an incredible national asset."
• McGurk has seen Biden direct real-time operations for up to five hours at a stretch. And after the terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, McGurk was there for a conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when Biden was "reasoning in a Socratic way and talking them off the ledge."
• Meeting with special forces commanders in 2022 before the U.S. killing of Hajji Abdullah, global leader of ISIS, Biden offered a prescient warning about suicide vests. "He has lived these issues," McGurk said.

2. Molly Murphy — a pollster for the Biden campaign, and president of Impact Research — set up a focus group in a Midwest battleground with about 60 swing voters, who used dials to show their mid-debate reactions. She says that when it came to deciding who to vote for, participants showed they were more concerned about the candidates' substance than style.

• "They did not think the president had a great performance," Murphy conceded in a phone interview.
• But she said Biden came out ahead when voters were asked who should lead the country, and which candidate was more likable, knowledgeable and presidential. The voters panned Trump's answers on Jan. 6 and Vladimir Putin.

Democrats urge Biden campaign to shift course

Extra meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers and strategists are scrambling, with some thinking that Biden's best move is to pivot to the offense by ramping up attacks on Trump and the conservative Supreme Court following Monday's ruling granting the former president substantial immunity from prosecution.

"There are days where Biden is the smartest person in the room, and I’m sure there are days where his age is slowing him down, but Biden needs to and the campaign needs to show more days where he is at the top of his game, where he is gregarious, where he is interacting, where he is quick on his feet. That’s how you turn this around," one Senate Democratic strategist told The Hill. "They have to show the American people that what happened last Thursday was an anomaly," the added.

According to the strategist, Biden is now the underdog.

"It’s no longer ‘could Biden do this or not.’ I think probably the prevailing sentiment is Biden is not up for the challenge. Whether that’s right or that’s wrong, I think that is now the prevailing sentiment," they said, adding "Biden is definitely the underdog now, but I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion Trump wins this race."

Right.