Joe Biden forgot the names of lawmakers, foreign dignitaries and even longtime aides as early as halfway into his term, according to a tell-all tome about the oldest-ever president’s failed 2024 re-election bid set for release next week.
The former vice president had displayed signs of mental slippage earlier during his 2020 campaign for the White House — but the decline accelerated over the course of his term, journalists Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper write in their new book “Original Sin,” set to be published May 20.
In December 2022, Biden couldn’t even recall his former top national security aide and communications director from his vice presidency — which had ended less than six years before.
“Steve,” he beckoned to his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, after announcing the US had secured the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner from a Russian prison in exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout.
“Steve,” the president asked again, trying to call him into an Oval Office meeting and referring at the same time to his former and current spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield as merely “Press.”
Sullivan first came to work for Biden in 2013, while Bedingfield started with the vice president in 2015.
Biden also badly bungled the basketball star’s wife’s name at the White House.
“These past few months have been hell for Brittney and for Charlee and her entire family and all her teammates back home,” he said, mangling Griner’s wife’s name, Cherelle.
Months earlier, in an incident curiously absent from the book, Biden had mistakenly called out for the late Rep. Jackie Walorski to identify herself at a bipartisan event in Washington, DC — a month after the Indiana Republican died in a car crash.
“I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like Representative [Jim] McGovern, Senator [Mike] Braun, Senator [Cory] Booker, Representative Jackie — are you here? Where’s Jackie? — I think she was going to be here,” he had said.
Ex-Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, who was political director of Biden’s 1988 campaign, saw some of the president’s flubs on TV from afar and began working the phones in 2023 to see if Democrats had a viable replacement candidate.
Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison later that fall met Biden at a Congressional Black Caucus event and the president kept shaking his hand without appearing to recognize him.
Those lapses grew more frequent the following year when he mixed up the names of French President Emmanuel Macron with a deceased predecessor as well as the leaders of Mexico and Egypt in February 2024.
The latter mix-up occurred at a press conference after special counsel Robert Hur announced he wasn’t prosecuting Biden for “willfully” hoarding classified documents after leaving the vice presidency, in part because a jury might view him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
“I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden exploded at the White House press conference following the Hur report’s release.
But those closest to the president — including Mike Donilon, who had worked for Biden since 1981 — didn’t engage in discussions about whether the president should run for re-election, even after he had struggled with memory lapses in front of them.
Biden even forgot Donilon’s name during a 2019 presidential campaign stop in Iowa — weeks before the Democratic caucuses — in what Thompson and Tapper say was “the only time aides worried” about his mental acuity in the primary.
“You, know, you know,” Biden reached for the name of his adviser of more than 40 years.
After the president’s frozen debate performance against Donald Trump in June 2024, Donilon would tell panicked Democrats who called: “I promise he’s okay.”
But a senior White House aide told Thompson and Tapper of Biden for their book: “We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”
