There was no cover-up and there was nothing wrong with President Biden

[Self Esteem]

67. I don't know if I'd say there was a cover up but there was definitely a refusal to address his biggest vulnerabilities.

His campaign and his staff failed to reassure American voters he had the mental acuity and stamina to handle four more years of the job. Poll after poll indicated Biden's biggest vulnerability as a candidate was his age and there was never a cohesive attempt to fix that narrative.

Biden held fewer interviews and press conferences than any president in modern history.

He stopped doing townhalls.

His campaign adopted a much quieter approach where they would focus on retail politics instead of big rallies and meeting with local press.

Biden even refused to go on favorable media shows like MSNBC.

He did an interview with Nicolle Wallace in the summer of 2023 and that was the last time he actually conducted a thorough interview with anyone from MSNBC until his final week in office when he sat down with Lawrence O'Donnell.

The reason this narrative sticks is because Biden wasn't out there proving it wrong.

Every public event was scripted - generally a 15 or so minute speech given to a small crowd before he jetted off.

That stuff adds up over time. Especially during a campaign. Biden needed to do more and he and his team refused to - for whatever reason.

And unfortunately, that's where the questions persist: why did they hold Biden back - a man who historically was known for his impromptu speeches and love of meeting with the press?

For Biden to have had any hope of winning in 2024, he needed to run a vigorous campaign. He was not. His campaign was constantly polling behind Trump - even before the debate - and there was always persistent concerns about his age. We needed him out in front of the media every day. We needed him holding town halls (his last town hall was at the end of 2022 - before that, he held one in 2021). We needed more press conferences.

None of that was there and so when the debate happened, and Biden put in maybe the worst performance of any presidential candidate ever, there was no going back ... because the campaign had failed to push back against the concerns for so long that at that point, no amount of strategy was going to fix the overall problem.

I sat in on a virtual meeting with Biden's pending reelection campaign in late 2023 that promised everyone on the call that Biden was going to run the most energetic, expansive campaign we've seen - that he was itching to get out in front of the voters and hold rallies since he felt robbed of that in 2020 with COVID. He was going to hit the ground running, starting with the SOTU speech and then go on a multi-state tour with VP Harris to push their agenda in front of large crowds. He was going to meet with the media members and put to bed the age issue because people would see he's up for the fight.

That was also the story he promised congressional Democrats - and a big reason many of them backed him without reservation early on.

None of that happened. The campaign's roll out was slower than expected. The 2024 SOTU speech was met with only a small rally the day after in Pennsylvania and then Georgia.

He held only a handful of rallies the rest of March.

Most were short speeches.

In this speech at a rally in Milwaukee, Biden's speech didn't even last ten minutes.

There were genuine concerns and the refusal of his team to address them has set this all up in motion. I do not believe Biden was mentally impaired but I do believe there were concerns about his ability to handle the rigors of a campaign and fair or not: the campaign is your chance to prove you have the energy to run the country for four more years.

In that regard, absolutely Biden's team failed him.