Biden Aide: You’re Damned Right We Gaslit America

But don’t call it a cover-up, says longtime Biden aide Michael LaRosa. “We all wear makeup on TV,” LaRosa tells Puck’s Tara Palmieri at one point. But we don’t put makeup on faces that no longer have noses or eyes. And the White House had troweled on cognitive “makeup” on Joe Biden for a lot longer than just in 2024, too.

At least LaRosa admits that the concern actually started in 2019, and had gotten to the press enough that questions about Biden’s stamina had already arisen:

Tara Palmeri: You worked so closely with the Biden family for years. I have to ask, do you think it’s accurate, as Original Sin states, that there were “desperate efforts to hide the extent of [Biden’s] deterioration” in 2024?

Michael LaRosa: There are many things there that are true, in my view. Calling it a cover-up is a little harsh and exaggerated. Every politician, every human being, tries to cover up their age. We all wear makeup on TV.

So we were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue. From the moment I joined the campaign in the fall of 2019, it was a problem. I was recently quoted in the lead of a Wall Street Journal piece by Annie Linskey—I love her, she’s a good reporter, though I felt a bit like my quote may have been misconstrued. The story began with me saying that I was asked to walk back my comment to a reporter for The Des Moines Register, who asked me to confirm the number of counties Jill Biden had visited. I had worked for her as her traveling press secretary, and the reporter was working on a profile of Jill. When I mentioned that conversation to her chief of staff [Anthony Bernal], he wasn’t happy, because they were hyperaware that if she’d been going to more counties than Biden had, that would provoke more discussion about his age.

Having mentioned 2019, Palmieri then does nothing to follow up on 2020-2022. She sticks to the script and assumptions of the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book by focusing entirely on 2024 in discussing Biden’s cognitive collapse. LaRosa tries to play it off, but admits to ‘gaslighting,’ while shifting the focus to polling:

Here’s another quote from the book: “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an, at times, addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.” 

There are some things that are true, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling. All of the polling in the spring of 2023, and then the fall of 2023, showed that there was no real depth of support from his own party, let alone independents and Republicans. And Biden had been tied, or within the margin of error, with Trump—who had, by that point, how many court hearings? How many indictments? The fact that he was so close was always a problem, but they were kind of in denial.

Again, though, this misses a huge period of time. Biden’s only in the race in 2024 because the White House and the DNC reset the rules for the primary in 2023 and starved any potential challengers of access and funding. Palmieri sticks to the assumptions of the book rather than reporting since the June 27 presidential debate from people such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that make clear that major donors and party officials began raising red flags in early 2023 about Biden’s capacity. 

That wasn’t about polling — it was about Biden getting physically and intellectually lost in public appearances. Thompson certainly knows this, as he clipped the passage from Woodward’s book last October:

Woodward reports in his new book that Biden donors began expressing concern about Biden’s mental fitness in June of 2023.

At a Los Gatos event: Biden was “frightening awful” and like your 87-year-old senile grandfather.”
“He could not wait to sit down and only took 2… pic.twitter.com/LMTJUsOMfh

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 23, 2024

The book apparently casts the “original sin” as the decision to let Biden run for a second term. That’s not the original sin, but its inevitable product. The cover-up of Biden’s encroaching senility went back even further, at least to the April 2022 emergency Easter Bunny intervention, and in some reporting as far back as October 2021. The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2024 that House Democrats and Nancy Pelosi knew Biden was failing even then and kept quiet about it. By the time of the Easter Bunny intervention, foreign leaders had figured it out as well, the WSJ report went on to reveal:

In spring 2022, some European officials began to notice that something might be amiss. Biden was chairing an online video call on Ukraine with the G-7 leaders, a tightly scheduled discussion where Biden called on one leader at a time to give a statement. Sitting in the Oval Office, Biden at one point forgot to unmute his mic, then lost his train of thought and began mumbling, according to an official on the call. He appeared to lose the order of which leader should speak next, and then tried to end the call without calling on Macron. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intervened to remind him, and Macron was given his turn. …

By the summer of 2022, some in Washington were beginning to comment on the president’s condition, privately and—on rare occasion—publicly. Some administration officials were noticing that Biden struggled to bring energy at White House events, particularly those later in the day, and often appeared to have difficulty reading the teleprompter. In September 2022, Biden called out for a deceased congresswoman during a public event, asking, “Where’s Jackie?” The lawmaker, Rep. Jackie Walorski (R., Ind.), had died the previous month in a car accident.

That fall, a former senior cabinet agency official began telling associates that Biden shouldn’t seek re-election, saying he wouldn’t be an effective candidate.

I’ll go one further. In the final debate of the 2020 election, Joe Biden spent the last 30 minutes looking much as he did in the June 2024 debate. He began to get incoherent, fumbled badly on an energy question, and looked as though he’d come unplugged. It even drew comments at the time about Biden’s stamina, but in retrospect it looks like sundowning. 

With all that evidence, why are we only discussing 2024 regarding gaslighting? Why even 2023? This goes back to the beginning of the Biden presidency, and raises critical questions about who really ran the executive branch while using Biden as a front man. That’s the original sin; the decision to run for a second term is the consequence of allowing unelected people to use Biden as a puppet in the first place, whose taste for power clearly wasn’t slaked with just four years. 

And this is why the task of getting these answers can’t be trusted to members of the Protection Racket Media. They were co-conspirators to the gaslighting that LaRosa semi-admits to Palmieri. They refused to take these concerns seriously, and spent most of their energy attacking and shutting down anyone who did. Now they want to tell the story, but only in the context which gives themselves the best chance of avoiding their own culpability for the four-year fraud perpetrated on the American public.