Biden Aides Were Willing to Go Rogue to Stop Trump

Do you remember all that talk about the norms? How Joe Biden’s 2020 ‘win’ was the return to that or something. It wasn’t. The book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson about the former president’s shambolic four years in office and the prolonged cover-up of his declining health has become the ultimate hate read. The pair were part of the media cover-up, though their insights into this circus cannot be ignored: Biden couldn’t remember the names of key staff, George Clooney, and even bombed a town hall session that Steven Spielberg helped produce during the 2024 cycle.

I don’t want to hear about “norms” ever again. https://t.co/nA3fvPlhpS
— Emma-Jo Morris (@EmmaJoNYC) May 27, 2025

The simulated town hall—a run-of-the-mill campaign event used to clip snippets for ads—was a disaster. The infamous Los Angeles fundraiser, where Barack Obama had to drag Joe across the finish line, led to Clooney cutting his ties to Biden. Now, we learn that his staff was more than willing to go rogue to keep Biden in power—Trump derangement syndrome was still cursing through these people’s veins, leading to their willingness to veer into undemocratic means of self-preservation. What a trainwreck (via NY Post):

Joe Biden’s aides were willing to do “undemocratic things” to cover up the former president’s mental decline and keep him in power for another four years, the author of a bombshell book revealed Sunday.
Biden’s team of unelected staffers felt justified in “picking up the slack” for the faltering commander in chief and shielding him from the public because they viewed President Trump as an “existential threat” to democracy, Alex Thompson, co-author of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” told Fox News’ Shannon Bream.
“Who would have been running the White House in a second Biden term?” Bream asked Thompson, after noting that he quoted a long-time Biden aide in his book “basically admitting he shouldn’t be running again.”
“Well, this person went on to say that when you’re voting for a president, you’re voting for the aides around him,” the author and Axios journalist revealed.
[…]
Bream highlighted a passage from Thompson’s book, where one anonymous aide argued Biden “just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years. He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while … His aides could pick up the slack.”
Thompson explained that in his reporting for the book with co-author Jake Tapper, it became clear that many in Biden’s orbit were willing to go to extreme lengths if it meant keeping Trump out of the Oval Office.
“If you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy — you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which I think is what this person is talking about,” Thompson told Bream.