The White House refused to confirm or deny Monday whether President Joe Biden intends to use performance-enhancing drugs in preparation for the presidential debates.
Former President Donald Trump believes Biden should receive a drug test before the debates.
“I don’t want him coming in like the State of the Union,” Trump told Republicans during a speech in Minnesota on Friday. “He was high as a kite. I said, ‘Is that Joe up there, that beautiful room? And by the end of the evening, he’s like” — Trump made a guttural sound — “He was exhausted, right? No, we’re going to demand a drug test.”
“He can’t talk, he can’t walk, can’t find his way off a stage. Can’t put two sentences together,” Trump added. “Although he has agreed to debate, so I don’t know, maybe they know something. He’s going to be so jacked up for those debates, you watch.”
Politico Playbook asked the White House to confirm Biden’s position on the use of drugs to potentially improve his performance. “We thought it was an obvious joke but not everyone on the Biden campaign got it,” Playbook reported.
The White House did not confirm or deny Biden’s potential drug use in its full response:
It’s telling that Republican officials are unable to stop announcing how intimidated they remain by [the] President’s State of the Union performance. But after losing every public and private negotiation with President Biden — and after seeing him succeed where they failed across the board, ranging from actually rebuilding America’s infrastructure to actually reducing violent crime to actually outcompeting China — it tracks that those same Republican officials mistake confidence for a drug.
Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff who is going on vacation to help Biden prepare for the debates, did not respond to Playbook’s request for comment about “whether any illegal substances are used as part of Klain’s debate prep.”
- About one-third of Democrats doubt Biden’s mental fitness, a Harvard/Harris survey recently found.
- Another poll revealed 82 percent of Americans harbor concerns about his physical and mental health.
- Only about one-third of voters say Biden is physically or mentally fit to serve a second term, Quinnipiac found.
On Friday, Biden, whom special counsel Robert Hur described as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” rejected more debates, which Trump said Biden had agreed to participate in.
The Biden campaign said the president would debate Trump only in June and September, without live audiences present. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will co-host the first event.
Trump accepted Biden’s invitation and urged the president to debate him earlier and more often.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
