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Former President Joe Biden’s White House chief of staff was referred to as “the Prime Minister” in the administration because he was the one making the “big decisions,” according to a bombshell book.
Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios share damning revelations about the alleged cover up of Biden’s mental and physical decline in the book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, out today.
Ron Klain, who served as Biden’s chief of staff from the start of his term until February 2023, was thought of as having “Prime Minister” status by people inside the administration because the president was so “limited”, according to Thompson.
Speaking to TIME, Thompson was asked about insiders referring “to Ron Klain as the Prime Minister.”
“When you have a President whose energy is limited, whose time is limited, whose bandwidth is limited, then a lot of decision making filters down,” Thompson responded. “And there were big decisions being made that people who had served in previous administrations and were surprised that Joe Biden was not involved in.”
Thompson added that one Cabinet member, who is not identified, told the authors: “The President is making the decisions, but if you present the decisions in a certain way, often it's not really a decision.”
Klain was “disappointed” in Biden’s lack of preparation for the disastrous debate against Donald Trump on June 27. “He’d been assured that Biden had been reviewing his prep materials before he arrived at Camp David, but he hadn’t,” the authors write.
In another book on Biden’s decline released last month by reporter Chris Whipple, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, Klain was said to be “startled” by the president’s demeanor during debate prep at Camp David.
“He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it,” The Guardian reported. “Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.”
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple writes in the book. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”
Klain later told Politico that the “framing” of his comments in the report was “wrong.”
Despite his previous remarks about the former president, responding to Thompson and Tapper’s latest book, Klain said that he still believed that Biden should not have dropped out of the race.
“We are all in decline. But the president was mentally sharp and capable of serving,” Klain told The Guardian. “I think his press conference after the Nato meeting in July proved that.”
The book’s release comes just two days after Biden revealed he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
In response to claims made in the book, Biden’s spokesperson Chris Meagher said that his team was “still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.”
“In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president,” Meagher added.
English (US) ·