Biden’s Team Decided Not to Give Him a Cognitive Test in Early 2024

There’s another book coming out this summer which sheds some light on Joe Biden’s mental state as he campaigned for a 2nd term in 2024. It’s titled “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America” and was co-written by three journalists from three different news outlets. Yesterday the NY Times published a preview of one story from the book about how Joe Biden’s team considered and then decided against giving him a cognitive test in February of 2024.

The debate over whether the president should take the test occurred in February 2024, several months before the June debate against President Donald Trump, and just a couple of weeks before Biden’s White House physical exam, the Times reported. 

It was the same month that Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report about the former president’s mishandling of classified documents was released. The special counsel described Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The report was released on Feb. 8 and became a topic of discussion in the media, with many Democrats arguing it was unfair of Hur to make comments about Biden if he didn’t plan to charge him with anything. Hur’s report specifically argued that it would be hard to get a conviction in part because a jury would by too likely to believe him if he said he couldn’t remember specific events.

The next day, Feb. 9th, was the day that Biden held a press conference where he got confused about the “President of Mexico.”

When President Biden appeared at a last-minute news conference on Thursday night, he hoped to assure the country of his mental acuity hours after a special counsel’s report had devastatingly referred to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Instead, a visibly angry Mr. Biden made the exact type of verbal flub that has kept Democrats so nervous for months, mistakenly referring to the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as the “president of Mexico” as he tried to address the latest developments in the war in Gaza…

Still, Mr. Biden’s mix-up of Egypt and Mexico came soon after a couple of slips in the last week regarding deceased European leaders. First, during a campaign swing in Nevada, he confused François Mitterrand, a former French president who died in 1996, with the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. Then, on Wednesday, he referred twice to having met in 2021 with Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor who died in 2017, instead of with Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.

Suffice it to say, the Biden team was on the back foot after that news conference and was probably looking for a way to convince people he was fine. Since Biden’s final medical exam before the 2024 election was released at the end of February, it seems his team was considering adding the cognitive exam to the other tests performed by his doctor. 

The story claims Biden’s team was confident he would pass the cognitive exam, but decided not to do it because it would only add to the discussion of his decline by suggesting the test was necessary. They may also have been put off by the fact that Biden’s doctor had warned he would treat Biden like any other patient, without regard to his political office. In other words, if Biden had failed the test he would not have been willing to pretend otherwise.

There’s one more tidbit in the story about David Axelrod who was one of the few “elder statesmen” in the Democratic Party who had questioned Biden’s fitness to run for a 2nd term. Back in 2002, Axelrod had said Biden looked his age and suggested he didn’t seem capable of running again. 

“The stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” Mr. Axelrod said.

That comment prompted an angry call to Mr. Axelrod from Ron Klain, then Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, according to the book. Mr. Klain wanted to know why Mr. Axelrod was fueling doubts about a Democratic president who was on track to begin a re-election campaign.

“There’s no Obama out there, Axe,” Mr. Klain told him, the book recounts. “Who’s going to do it if he doesn’t do it?”

Those comments reflect on Biden but also on Kamala Harris. As I said several times before the election, the Democrats’ biggest problem was that the only alternative to Biden was someone arguably worse. It sounds pretty clear that Ron Klain felt that way already in 2022. He knew then the party had no better option that an aging Joe Biden.