Joe Biden’s Final Days: Did Aides Cover Up His Mental State—or Was It Group Delusion?

In late June 2024, just a few days after Joe Biden’s implosion in his televised debate with Donald Trump, one of the president’s best friends got a call on his iPhone. The familiar baritone voice on the other end, much stronger than it had been during the debate, was unmistakable. “It’s Joe,” he said. There was a pause. “Joe Biden.”

His friend replied: “Yeah, no shit.”

Biden burst out laughing. “Hey, thanks for talking Valerie off the ledge,” the president said.

Just after midnight on the evening of that disastrous debate, the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, weeping and distraught, had called her brother’s friend looking for answers and blasted the debate-prep team. Biden’s friend had calmed her down. “No problem,” he told the president. “You don’t have to thank me.” Biden paused and then said, “What do you think?”

His friend couldn’t resist this softball.

“About what?” he said.

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Biden cracked up again. The president laughed for four or five seconds. And then, “in a very strong voice filled with timbre,” his friend recalled, “he said, ‘Hey man, that’s why I love you. You’re a fucking wise guy.’ And as he said it, I thought to myself, ‘Where did that voice go? Where did that guy with that voice go? What the fuck happened to this guy?’”

What the fuck happened to Joe Biden during the final days of his presidency is a subject of increasingly contentious debate. Angered by his last-minute abdication from the race, Democrats have blamed the president for putting Kamala Harris in a no-win situation, with too short a runway to mount a successful campaign against Trump. Biden’s advisers, it is said, engaged in a cover-up of his deteriorating mental condition, which was dramatically and publicly exposed during the debate. In this version of events, Biden’s inner circle knew the president was non compos mentis and hid this fact from the American public.

In fact, it was stranger–and in a way, more troubling–than that. A cover-up, as we’ve understood the term to mean since Watergate, involves deliberately hiding something you know to be true. Biden’s closest advisers, however, were operating in a fog of delusion and denial; they refused to believe what they could see with their own eyes. Despite the president’s obvious cognitive decline, they had convinced themselves that he was fine. Their failure to recognize, up close, what everyone else could see from afar—that Biden was too feeble to run for reelection at the age of 82—led to a political disaster. And a relatively unproven national candidate, his vice president, was thrown into the race at the eleventh-hour against an emboldened Donald Trump. Biden had stepped aside on July 21—eight days after the GOP nominee had survived an assassination attempt.

Anyone who’s ever had to persuade an octogenarian grandfather to give up the car keys knew that it was time for the president to step aside. (Seventy-seven percent of Americans and 69 percent of Democrats opposed Biden running for a second term. A goodly share didn’t want Trump either.) But in the summer of 2024, Joe Biden was having none of it. And neither were many of his family, friends, and advisers. Despite months of public opinion polling that showed Biden potentially losing to Trump in critical battleground states, they were all-in on his bid for reelection.

Their reasons were both understandable–and delusional. Biden’s naysayers, some of his advisers reasoned, had been wrong in 2020 when they’d pronounced him politically dead after he placed fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. Biden had gone on to win the nomination and beat Trump in the general election by seven million votes. Come 2024, Bidenworld believed the doubters were wrong again.

But as George Clooney wrote in a blunt New York Times op-ed piece in the summer of 2024, Biden could not win the battle against time. His advisers should have known this but refused to face the fact, head on. Bill Daley watched this spectacle unfold in disbelief. Scion of the legendary Chicago Democratic family, Daley, who served as Barack Obama’s second White House chief of staff, says there’s a kind of myopia that comes with proximity to the president.

“You’re in the bubble,” he told me. “You’ve crossed the Rubicon.” Something in the air of the West Wing clouds the vision of those who work there, particularly those who’ve been with the president for decades. “Everybody bought into it,” said Daley of the notion that Biden should run for reelection. “And once they crossed the Rubicon, they bullshitted everybody to stay out of the race.” Jack Watson, chief of staff in Jimmy Carter’s White House, compares working there to being in a magnetic force field. The gravitational pull to protect the president–at almost any cost–is immense.

I had my own reasons for wondering if Biden’s White House staff was hiding him. As far back as September of 2022, when I asked for an interview with the president for my book on the first two years of his administration, The Fight of His Life, it was granted on one condition: I would send my questions by email and Biden would answer them in writing. It was clear, in hindsight, that the commander-in-chief’s aides didn’t want to risk having him interact in real time with a reporter. When I complained about getting emailed answers, I was told, “If it’s any consolation, we’re not even doing this for [Bob] Woodward.”

And yet Joe Biden was no Woodrow Wilson. In 1919, the 28th president suffered a serious stroke; a cover-up ensued; and Wilson’s second wife, Edith, allegedly performed many of her incapacitated husband’s presidential duties. By contrast, whatever you may think of his policies, Biden governed competently behind closed doors. Visitors can attest that during meetings, he commanded every detail and nuance of Middle East policy. On the morning he stepped aside, when senior staffers arrived to hammer out the announcement of his abdication, the president was on the phone, parsing the details of a complex, multi-nation prisoner swap. Mike Donilon, Biden’s senior adviser and confidant, who was with him more than almost anyone, swears he never saw the president mentally diminished. So unless someone produces a failed neurological exam–or a deep-sixed Parkinson’s diagnosis–this was not a classic cover-up but a case of collective denial among Biden, first lady Jill Biden, and the president’s closest aides. Out of a desire to cling to power or just wishful thinking, they believed what they wanted to believe.

Still, Biden’s team knew it had a problem: the president was a shadow of himself on the stump. That’s one of the reasons why, in 2020, they effectively arranged for Biden to run his campaign from his basement. In March 2024, a veteran Democratic operative interviewed for a top campaign job with Biden and his aides in the Oval Office. The job interview took a surprisingly candid turn. “Part of their discussion on the strategy of the [reelection] campaign,” she told me, “was ‘Hey, in 2020 we had this great excuse of the basement, of COVID, to keep him out of the public eye. We no longer have that excuse. What do we do?’”

Over Saint Patrick’s Day weekend 2024, at a small White House party, Biden spoke to guests using a teleprompter. Daley (who, on a dozen visits to the White House, was never invited to drop in on Biden) couldn’t believe it. If the president needed a script for a small gathering of Irish guys, how would he survive the rigors of a campaign? “How are they letting this thing go on?” he thought. “This is crazy.”

Daley ran into his friend Tom Donilon, a long-time national security expert and brother of Biden’s adviser Mike. Why hadn’t anyone spoken to the president about stepping aside and giving someone else a chance to beat Trump? “How are they letting this fucking thing go on?” Daley asked him. Donilon shook his head. “I don’t believe there’s anyone who’s had the conversation with him about not running, including my brother,” he said. If Mike Donilon, Biden’s alter ego, hadn’t spoken to the president about his age, it was almost certain that no one had.

Nor did Democrats dare talk about Biden’s age—at least in public. “Everyone ignored it,” said Daley. Challenging the incumbent president could be a political death wish. “Every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls.”

The depth of denial among Biden’s advisers became clear when they challenged Trump to an early debate, in June. For a campaign covering up for a doddering uncle, this would have been a crazy risk to take. Why would Biden’s handlers, knowing that he’d lost his verbal fastball, send him out to pitch against Trump? They could have held out for a later debate in the fall, effectively running out the clock. (If Biden then fell on his face, it would be too late to replace him as the nominee.) The answer is that Biden’s top aides—campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, Donilon, and senior adviser Anita Dunn—must have believed, erroneously, that he could go toe-to-toe with Trump.

When Daley heard that Biden’s aides were considering a June debate, he was aghast. It was pure hubris. “They were so cocky,” he said. “They got CNN, they got the moderators, they got the rules—no audience. They were telling[people]: ‘We got everything we wanted.’” Daley foresaw disaster. He called up Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients. “Jeff, I know you’re debating whether to debate,” he told him. “Do not do this. I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’m just telling you, come up with something, but do not do it.”

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On Friday, June 21, 2024, Joe Biden arrived at Camp David to prepare for the debate. Just six days away, it might well decide the outcome of the 2024 election.

The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warning light. At his first meeting with Biden, Ron Klain, his former White House chief of staff, who was in charge of debate prep, was startled. He’d never seen Biden so exhausted and out of it. He seemed unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. The president appeared obsessed with foreign policy and uninterested in his second-term plans. During one prep session in Aspen Lodge, the presidential cabin, Biden suddenly got up, walked out to the pool, collapsed on a lounge chair, and fell sound asleep. Yet his advisers were undaunted. With unintended irony, one of them explained their strategy to me: “An early debate would quiet fears that the president was infirm.”

That evening, Biden met again with Klain, Donilon, senior adviser Steve Ricchetti, and deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed. “We sat around the table,” said Klain. “He had answers on cards and I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.”

The first of two mock debates was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the general subjects that might come up during the debate. “All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs,” said Klain. Biden had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term. Klain prodded him: “Look, sir, you’re not really telling people what you’re going to do if they reelect you.”

“I’m not going to make more promises,” the president snapped. “I made too many promises in 2020 and I delivered on most of them, and all people remember are the things I didn’t deliver on.”

Klain retorted: “Well, you have to make some promises to get reelected, sir.”

In hopes of piquing his interest in a forward-thinking agenda, Klain arranged a phone call with Melinda French Gates, a persuasive childcare advocate. Biden perked up briefly but soon lost interest again. At one point, Biden had an idea. If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was the one whose answers were batty or half-baked.. Klain replied: “Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”

Twenty-five minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. “I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,” he said. “I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.” He went off to bed.

Klain tried to remind himself that Biden had always been a game-day player. Maybe the president would rise to the occasion as he had often done before.

On June 27, debate night, Biden arrived at CNN headquarters just before the 9 p.m. start. He was offered a “walk-through”—a chance to check out the camera angles from the podium—but he waved it off. Minutes later, the president and Trump took the stage.

Twelve minutes later came disaster. Asked about the deficit, Biden froze, his expression vacant; he seemed unaware of where he was. Some observers wondered if he was having a ministroke. Then he said: “We finally beat Medicare.”

From behind the stage, in a green room, Trump’s campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita looked at his colleague Susie Wiles and Tony Fabrizio, their pollster, and said: “He’s dead. He’s not going to stay.”

As Biden continued to flail, Trump recognized what was happening and let his opponent self-destruct. After an incomprehensible jumble of words from Biden, Trump parried: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence and I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Klain, Donilon, Ricchetti, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and other Biden staffers were watching the debacle from a room below the CNN stage. On a Zoom monitor they could see O’Malley Dillon at a separate location, monitoring “dial groups”—focus groups of voters who turned a dial up or down to register their approval or disapproval in real time. The Biden dials were headed south. It was possibly the most disastrous performance ever delivered in a presidential debate—and a fatal blow to Biden’s hopes for reelection. Any objective viewer could see that the president was incapable of waging an effective campaign against Trump.

But Biden’s team didn’t see it that way. Ricchetti contended that he thought the president had just had a bad night—like Barack Obama’s lackluster first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012. Dunn argued that the president had actually won the faceoff with the undecided voters who mattered. Like O’Malley Dillon, she’d been watching voter dial groups during the debate and noted that as it wore on, they’d disliked Trump even more than Biden. “It’s a good illustration of the difference between voters and elites,” she said. “Voters experience this differently. They hated Donald Trump. We actually picked up a few votes in the group.” Even the normally clear-eyed O’Malley Dillon grasped for a silver lining. Her first thought wasn’t “How can we talk to the president about stepping aside?” It was: not that many people had actually seen the debate. (Yet an estimated 51 million people were watching.)

Biden’s key advisers were among the best and the brightest, adept at managing policy, politics, and public relations at the presidential level. But now they were the blind leading the blind. Some had spent decades rallying around Biden whenever he came under attack; their instinct was to adopt a defensive crouch.

Nearly four months later, when I spoke with Reed and Ricchetti at the White House, they were still trapped in that force field of denial. The problem, they insisted, wasn’t Biden’s condition, it was three weeks of Democratic infighting and the media’s obsession with his debate performance.

The weekend of July 20–21, 2024, would prove to be seminal, a hinge of American history.

As Joe Biden convalesced with a case of COVID at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Maryland, the cries for him to give up his reelection campaign grew louder.

On Friday, July 19, Klain called the president. They talked about the growing pressure on him to withdraw. Klain urged Biden to resist it. “That’s my intention,” he replied.

For the next 48 hours, there was radio silence. Other than Biden’s Secret Service detail, the only people at the Rehoboth house were Jill Biden and his “body people,” deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s senior adviser. No one knew if Biden was considering throwing in the towel—but back at the White House, one aide thought the president’s silence was telling. “He’s somebody who checks in pretty frequently and wants to know what’s going on and wants to talk things through,” he said. “When things went quiet, I think we knew he was seriously thinking about it.”

On Saturday morning, July 20, Donilon and Ricchetti arrived at the president’s beach house. With more than 60 years of service to Biden between them, they’d been at his side through innumerable political and personal crises. But the president’s men had never faced a situation with such grave stakes for the country and the world.

Ricchetti, bearing polling data, went first. He told the president that while he was down by a few points nationally, and more in the battleground states, he was within the historical margin to come back and win. Public opinion wasn’t the obstacle; the party was. Most of its leaders were against him. “There’s a path for you to win the nomination and the presidency,” Ricchetti told the president, “but it will be brutal, and you will have to wage a fierce, lonely fight against your own party. This could hurt your reputation for being a unifying commander-in-chief that is core to you.” But if Biden wanted to run again, Ricchetti was all-in.

In fact, the path to a Biden victory was almost nonexistent; Trump’s polling lead in the battleground states was essentially insurmountable. But even at this late hour Ricchetti and Donilon were soft-pedaling this hard reality. What the president’s aides could not sugarcoat was the fact that the party’s leaders were about to lower the boom on him. “They knew the honeymoon was over that weekend,” a source close to the leadership told me. “Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries would have all been publicly calling for him to get out.”

As the walls closed in, Biden felt abandoned. It was his perceived betrayal by Barack Obama that stung most of all. What hurt was that Obama hadn’t picked up the phone and called him. “The one thing that still gnaws at him,” one of Biden’s close friends told me, “is the fact that Obama never called him to have misgivings about his candidacy—to say, ‘You know, Jeez, Joe, are you sure you’re up to it?’”

Biden wasn’t even sure his White House staff had his back. “He was like ‘What happened here?’” said a confidant. “‘Why was there no one on my side?’ And he got very focused on whether or not people were being loyal to him inside the building. I think he lost confidence in the people right around him.”

But Biden’s major players were still with him; Donilon, Ricchetti, and Klain were committed to his reelection; they would have died on that hill. The president turned to Donilon, his longtime wordsmith “If I were to drop out,” he said, “what would it look like and sound like?”

Donilon said he’d knock out a draft of a withdrawal statement. Biden told him, “I want to sleep on it.”

At about noon the next day, Sunday, Jeff Zients was in his West Wing office when his phone lit up. “I’ve decided not to run,” Biden told his White House chief of staff. Zients tried to engage him. “That lasted about a minute,” Zients recalled, “because he said, ‘What I really want to talk about is how do we have as productive a six-month period—that’s how much time was left—as we’ve had in the first three and a half years.’”

Who, if anyone, should Biden endorse as his successor? It was a momentous question. Indeed, everything was riding on Biden’s successor—not only the outcome of the 2024 presidential election but the fate of Biden’s agenda, his historical legacy, and the future of the party.

The decision was Biden’s alone to make.

Just after he spoke to Zients, Biden called Kamala Harris.

Within 48 hours, working the phones with her staff from her dining room at the Naval Observatory, Harris had all but clinched the nomination against all potential Democratic challengers.

But there were only 107 days until the election. The runway was short to mount an effective campaign against the Trump juggernaut.

Democrats had been saddled with the last-minute candidacy of an untested nominee. And for one reason: No one in Biden’s inner circle had leveled with the president about the folly of running at his advanced age and uncertain state. History will likely judge harshly the men and women who served him. Leon Panetta, 86, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff and Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary, was blunt. “I think they were living in an isolated world,” he told me. “Everybody was marching to the same tune. And there was nobody there to say, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ They just never had a grown-up in the room who could look Joe Biden in the eye and say, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”

In February 2025, more than three months after Harris’s defeat, Mike Donilon appeared at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Biden’s confidant was more convinced than ever, he told the audience, that the Democrats had made a terrible mistake by forcing the president to leave the ticket. Just four years earlier, the man had won 81 million votes. “I thought it was crazy they would walk away from the single greatest vote-getter in American history,” Donilon said. “I thought it was insane. I think the party lost its mind.”

Biden’s old friend—the one he calls a wise guy, who’d talked his sister Valerie off the ledge after that horrible debate—had a different view. Joe Biden, he told me, has yet to accept the way his presidency ended. “Depending on what day of the week it is, depending on whether he sees Trump on a video replay at night, he’ll say, ‘I could have beat that fucking guy.’ But he couldn’t have. I don’t know if in his lifetime he’ll ever really come to that conclusion. But that debate was it for him. You cannot erase that image in the minds of millions of voters.”

From the forthcoming book Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple. Copyright © 2025 by CCWhip Productions. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.