It’s not exactly a secret. Democrats are still lost in the political wilderness. You have zero messaging right now on the budget reconciliation process going up on the Hill, which is a gimme. Instead, these people are foaming at the mouth over what Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are doing to trim the size and scope of our government. The Democrats have severe structural problems that will not be solved or mended in one election cycle.
Yet, before they can even get close to a conversation on that, we have former Obama staffers dredging up old 2024 moments to frame somehow a narrative that the party went ballistic for all the wrong reasons after the disastrous June debate on CNN. In that bout, Donald Trump wiped the floor with Joe Biden, to the point where Democratic National Committee staffers were aghast at the former president’s total collapse before a national audience. They bought into the lie that Joe was mentally sound—he was not. It left the party shell-shocked, panicking, and racing for an alternative. The only problem was that the alternative wasn’t any better: Kamala Harris was just a younger version of Biden but with the same mental deficits who picked a total weirdo in Tim Walz as her running mate.
Top Biden adviser Mike Donilon on the post-debate fallout last year:
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) February 22, 2025
“lots of people have terrible debates…usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind and that’s what happened here. It melted down.”
Adds that he thought pushing Biden out was “insane” pic.twitter.com/6aIczriLKt
Former Biden press secretary Karine Jean Pierre on the post-debate fall-out.
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) February 27, 2025
“It was a firing squad…I had never seen anything like that before…that was shocking, shocking…It was truly, truly unfortunate. And I think it hurt us more than folks realized.” pic.twitter.com/GrFwP7muRo
Former top Biden adviser Mike Donilon described that debate as one where the party “melted down,” adding that there usually isn’t a panic when there’s a stormy debate performance. Donilon said the Democratic Party lost its mind after Biden's election-killing performance. Karine Jean-Pierre echoed similar sentiments about the Biden ouster as well.
Okay, this is rich: these two were key figures in the cover-up. Donilon was the ‘yes’ man in the former president’s inner circle, while Pierre lied to the American public daily about Biden’s mental health. We’re lucky that KJP was abysmal at her job, as anyone with the skills to spin the room would’ve likely crafted a narrative that was sellable, at least plausible, unlike the word salads that were served daily. We knew Biden was cooked; the media likely did but opted not to investigate further out of fear of helping Trump and losing access.
The debate was the nadir of the Biden presidency or was it the botched Afghanistan withdrawal that eviscerated Joe’s reputation as an empathetic leader—his polling began to slide and never recovered after the fall of Kabul.
