Mike Donilon, a top Biden adviser, claims the Democratic Party melted down after Joe Biden’s election-killing performance in the June debate on CNN. Donilon is one of the principals engaged in the Biden health cover-up. We knew this before Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper penned a shameless book about the topic; these two were also ones who ran interference on the subject. It’s not lost either, as Tapper had to hire a crisis PR firm to navigate this book launch.
We knew Biden was cooked. During the waning months of his presidency, it was clear this man couldn’t have survived another term in office, hence the numerous stories about wheelchair use and preparing for his death in office. Now, we’ve learned he has aggressive prostate cancer that’s metastasized to his bones, which doesn’t happen over the course of a single year. Given the extensive con job surrounding his mental health, Joe Biden, Democrats, and his inner circle can no longer be trusted to tell the truth about the cancer or much of anything.
While Donilon tried to claim the debate was an overreaction, behind the scenes, he and his staff worked hard to get ahead of the mental brainfarts the then-president had regularly. The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy piece about Biden’s failing mental health days before he imploded on CNN. Donilon got another publication to back off after personally yelling at the reporter. Yet, the book, shameless as it is, might provide a window into how bad Biden was at this stage, where Steven Spielberg was dragooned to help the aging president not look terrible in public. Still, it went beyond that—the methods were akin to Soviet politburo edits (via Semafor) [emphasis mine]:
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Journalists are like firefighters rushing into a fire unless they get an angry phone call from a White House that they agree with https://t.co/ixweFXDVGX
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 19, 2025
Reminder: The Biden campaign and Dem influencers tried to say this wasn’t happening.
— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) May 19, 2025
It was. pic.twitter.com/DiDjipDdIv
Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin, focuses much of its attention on media coverage of the 46th president, a topic of deep concern and obsession by the last administration and its top aides.
Semafor obtained a early copy of the book, which includes details about some previously unreported strategies the administration tried to keep the press from reporting on Biden’s age. The book notes, for example, that before The Wall Street Journal published its widely-read story questioning Biden’s mental acuity, a different national news outlet decided to scrap a story about Biden’s mental decline, following an angry call to the reporter from senior adviser Mike Donilon. It also chronicles the ways in which the campaign selectively tried to get in front of potentially damaging information, detailing how the White House leaked special prosecutor Robert Hur’s report first to journalists the Biden team perceived as sympathetic, hoping to pre-spin the details.
Digital video was a constant struggle for the Biden campaign, Tapper and Thompson write. The campaign tried to manage by enlisting director Steven Spielberg and getting creative with editing, even going as far as to stage a never-aired made-for-video town hall. Staff frequently used slow motion videos of Biden so people didn’t realize how slowly he was walking in real-time, and used extra edits to clean up his stumbles.
[…]
Before the June debate, Vice President Kamala Harris’ team had booked her on four TV networks to spin Biden’s performance. But the fallout from the contest was so intense that some staff advised her to cancel the appearances. While she decided to do the interviews, she may have ended up regretting participating in an appearance with CNN’s Anderson Cooper: The anchor’s difficult questioning seemed to get under the then-VP’s skin. After the interview, the book’s authors’ report, Harris was visibly angry with Cooper, and told staff that “this motherf*cker doesn’t treat me like the damn vice president of the United States.”
The institutional Left tried to deceive the public into thinking this man, who forgot top staffers names, who wandered off at the G-7 Summit, who slurred his speech, and who couldn’t remember when his son, Beau, died, was fit to run the country for another four years. Luckily, the American voter saw through this deception and overwhelmingly felt he was too old to be president when asked. The CNN debate sealed his fate. Not even Hollywood’s best could polish this turd. He was mentally diminished, sickly, and likely suffering from prostate cancer—they were going to run him anyway to avoid a GOP win, which was coming no matter what. Democrats became the Aztecs—willing to commit human sacrifices to appear their ‘woke’ gods. It failed.
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