THEY ALL KNEW: Top aides shielded Biden from staff, but couldn’t hide the debate.

Current and former White House aides are feeling whiplash — and now questioning whether Biden could fulfill a second term.

“It’s time for Joe to go.” That’s what Chandler West, the White House’s deputy director of photography from January 2021 to May 2022, wrote in an Instagram story after the debate.

“I know many of these people and how the White House operates. They will say he has a ‘cold’ or just experienced a ‘bad night,’ but for weeks and months, in private, they have all said what we saw last night — Joe is not as strong as he was just a couple of years ago,” West wrote, according to screenshots obtained by Axios.

Reached by phone, West said he wrote the post because “the debate was not the first bad day, and it’s not gonna be the last.” He declined to comment further.
The president and his team have acknowledged Biden had a bad night but said he had a cold.

Zoom in: Biden’s behavior stunned many in the White House in part because Biden’s closest aides — often led by Jill Biden’s top aide, Anthony Bernal, and deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini — took steps early in his term to essentially rope off the president.

They roped him off in the White House for the same reason they roped him off during the campaign four years ago — because they knew he was unfit then. And he’s clearly less fit now.