Former first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary Michael LaRosa said, “There are many things there that are true” regarding a new book exploring the “desperate efforts” to hide former President Joe Biden’s mental deterioration.
During a seminar at the Science Institute at American University this week, LaRosa was pressed on whether CNN anchor Jake Tapper got it right when he wrote in his recently released book Original Sin that there were “desperate efforts to hide the extent of [Biden’s] deterioration” in 2024.
“There are many things there that are true, in my view,” LaRosa, who also served as special assistant to the former president before leaving the White House in 2022, told Puck journalist Tara Palmeri.
LaRosa was also questioned about a quote in Original Sin, saying, “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an, at times, addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”
The ex-Biden aide agreed that some things were true, such as “gaslighting” about polls showing the former president had likely no chance of winning a second term as concerns about his mental fitness deepened.
“There was a lot of denial of the polling. All of the polling in the spring of 2023 and then the fall of 2023 showed that there was no real depth of support from his own party, let alone independents and Republicans…The fact that he was so close was always a problem, but they were kind of in denial,” LaRosa said.
However, he refused to characterize the denial as a cover-up.
“Calling it a cover-up is a little harsh and exaggerated. Every politician, every human being, tries to cover up their age. We all wear makeup on TV,” LaRosa said.
But Biden’s team “did do a lot of gaslighting,” he continued. “If you were watching MSNBC, you probably believed them. But if you were consuming information, consuming data, and looking at it objectively, and trying to interpret it and process it objectively, none of it was surprising.”
Even before the disastrous June 27, 2024 debate that highlighted Biden’s mental decline, a New York Times poll showed approximately 70% of all voters viewed Biden as “just too old to be an effective president,” a number that was “virtually unchanged since April” of that year.
The public expressed concern long before 2024. An August 2023 poll found 77% believed Biden was “too old to effectively serve another four-year term. And a Pew Research Center study showed only 46% of voters described Biden as “mentally sharp” during his 2020 campaign for the White House. By July 2024, that number had been cut nearly in half, with just 24% describing the then-Democratic nominee for president as mentally fit.
Even during Biden’s successful 2020 bid for office, his staffers embarked on an extensive public relations campaign designed to suppress “misinformation” that he was not mentally fit.
“We were always, from Day One, cognizant that age was an issue. From the moment I joined the campaign in the fall of 2019, it was a problem,” LaRosa said.
He said Biden’s people’s “message to everybody was to make sure you tell people, ‘It’s too early. These polls don’t mean anything.’”
“Then for about a year and a half, the numbers never moved, and by denying the data that was out there publicly, by denying and undermining the really insightful journalism that The New York Times was doing, that you were doing, and all of the free press, they were actually demeaning a lot of those people,” the ex-Biden aide continued.
In Feb. 2024, LaRosa dismissed fears that Biden wasn’t fit for another term in office in comments to the New York Times.
“Age be damned, he should be running again because he’s been the most consequential president in my lifetime,” he said.
By July 2024, after Biden was pushed to drop his reelection campaign, LaRosa said that during the disastrous debate, Americans saw “something that concerned them, that shocked them.”
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“But they also saw something that confirmed suspicions that they already had,” he said during an interview with Frontline. “I think voters made a deal with Joe Biden in 2020, and it was, get rid of this guy, one term, and pass the torch. And he wasn’t able to do—he didn’t do either.”
“People and voters have been speaking to the president. They have been speaking through polling for over a year now,” LaRosa said last July.
