PRESIDENT KLAIN DISSEMBLES: Ex-Biden aide Ron Klain was alarmed by ‘out of it’ prez ahead of disaster debate, book says.
Ron Klain, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden known for his intense loyalty, is insisting he “never doubted” Biden’s mental fitness — as a new book describes Klain’s distress ahead of Biden’s dismal June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.
In “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” author Chris Whipple writes that Klain viewed Biden, then 81, as “out of it” and even “half-seriously” worried that Biden thought he was “president of NATO.”
“I never doubted the president’s mental acuity,” Klain told The Post Wednesday after a report on Whipple’s book was published by the Guardian.
“He had become singularly focused on foreign policy and detached from Democratic allies in the pursuit of GOP support on Ukraine and Israel,” Klain said of his impressions of the 46th president.
“He thought that being a great foreign policy president was enough.”
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Whipple writes that Klain, Biden’s White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was “startled” when he arrived at Camp David to help with debate prep.
“He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it,” the author relates.
I suspect former President Klain saw former (P)resident Biden exhausted and out of it on numerous occasions when he was part of the Democrats’ brain trust running the show in DC under Biden’s name:
BIDEN: "Ron, who am I turning this over to?"
RON KLAIN: "Thank you very much Mr. President, I think it's time for our friends in the press to leave though." pic.twitter.com/nv8YqIW1oH
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) March 24, 2021
More on Klain and Biden’s career ending debate with Trump: In a new book, top Biden aide describes ‘out of it’ president before Trump debate.
Ron Klain served Biden from 2021 to 2023, then returned to his side last June to run debate preparation as he had for numerous Democratic presidents before.
According to Klain, it turned out that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job”.
As described by Klain to the reporter Chris Whipple, at one point Biden had an idea.
“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”
Flashback:
What struck me instead as I read Leibovich’s slightly tongue-in-cheek profile was the distance between the bourgeois comfort of Klain’s personal and professional life and the facts, as they say, on the ground. One cannot finish reading the Leibovich piece without coming to the conclusion that, all in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.
Klain is the most powerful chief of staff in recent memory, the beating heart of Joe Biden’s White House, a man whose portfolio is so wide-ranging and whose boss is so (let’s face it) odd that Republicans on Capitol Hill refer to him as “Prime Minister Klain.” Like most Washingtonians, he is a well-degreed workaholic, a graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Law School who has spent decades rotating from positions in Democratic administrations to lucrative gigs at the intersection of law, technology, and finance. He calls his expensive home in Chevy Chase, Md., “the house that O’Melveny built,” after legal giant O’Melveny & Myers, where he was a partner from 2001 to 2004.
Among his clients there were AOL Time Warner and Fannie Mae. In 2004 the chairman of AOL Time Warner, billionaire Steve Case, invited Klain to join his D.C.-based venture capital firm, Revolution. Leibovich informs us that Klain’s salary in 2020 was some $2 million. That buys you a lot of hors d’oeuvres.
What Ron Klain actually did in the private sector—besides tweet—is no mystery. By the alchemical process through which influence is manufactured in Washington, he converted his relationships with Democratic power brokers into cash money. “At times,” wrote Michael Scherer in a November 2020 profile for the Washington Post, “Klain appears to have worked with every Democratic leader of the past three decades.” Such a network is worth something to the incalculable number of interests seeking out favors, damages, or relief from the federal government.
—“The Mark of Klain,” Matthew Continetti, the Washington Free Beacon, July 23rd, 2021.
