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A former Biden administration official accused his former colleagues of ‘gaslighting’ journalists and voters by denying the truth about the president’s advancing age and frailty.
President Joe Biden was 81 when he bowed to the inevitable in July last year and ended his run for reelection.
Blame and recrimination have swirled among Democrats ever since, as they wonder what would have happened if he had dropped out sooner and Kamala Harris or another candidate had longer to make their case against the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Now Jill Biden’s former press secretary Michael LaRosa has lifted the lid on how he saw it go down. He said much of the blame should be leveled at officials who attacked anyone asking questions about Biden’s age.
And he described how officials were terrified of exposing an increasingly gaffe-prone president to the press.
‘We were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue,’ he said at an event at the Science Institute at American University on Wednesday.
The issue has come to the fore again in a new book, ‘Original Sin,’ by Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN anchor Jake Tapper which condemns the way the White House covered up Biden’s advancing age.
‘There are some things that are true, I mean, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling,’ said LaRosa.
Questions about President Joe Biden’s age couldn’t be ignored after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June last year. He quit the race less than a month later
‘And I will use the term gaslighting because that’s what they were doing, the campaign, former colleagues. The message to everybody was to make sure that you tell people it’s too early. It’s too early.
‘These polls don’t mean anything. Well, it became too early. And these polls don’t mean anything for about a year and a half. The polls, the numbers never moved.’
White House officials would punch back hard at any reporters who asked questions about Biden’s age.
And they succeeded in discouraging many news outlets from covering the issue.
But there was no ignoring the subject after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump last June. The president appeared to lose his train of thought multiple times and was left standing in awkward silence, surprising even his opponent.
‘By denying the data that was out there publicly, by denying the really insightful journalism, you know, they were actually demeaning to a lot of the people,’ said LaRosa.
‘But it was the data denial that really bothered me because we loved polling when we were running because we were always ahead.
‘All of a sudden, because they’re always behind, the polls are meaningless. And they were attacking The New York Times. They did do a lot of gaslighting of people. And I think if you were watching MSNBC, you probably believed them and were probably pretty shocked.’
Michael LaRosa as an aide to Jill Biden but has become a regular TV pundit
LaRosa is seen here with the first lady Jill Biden
LaRosa was forced out of the White House after bringing dates to secure floors of the president’s hotel during overseas trips.
Since then he has been a vocal critic of the way Biden was protected by his team.
‘The president’s team was scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, un-rehearsed, unpracticed, un-choreographed, anything, they couldn’t compete for the attention economy,’ he told journalist Tara Palmeri, during their onstage discussion.
‘They just couldn’t do it. They didn’t have any idea.
‘And they didn’t have the vessel either in Biden, by the way, who would have done anything. He loves TV. He loves doing stuff. It was the orbit that did not trust their own candidate.’
Biden left the White House on January 20 when Trump was sworn in for his second term in office.
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