Following President Biden’s disastrous debate on June 27, the Biden family holed up at Camp David for the weekend to discuss the “path forward” and to determine who was to blame for the president’s poor showing against challenger Donald Trump.
The family, led primarily by First Lady Jill Biden and son Hunter, urged the president to press forward with his reelection campaign, despite the rising calls from both pundits and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race.
Instead, the Biden family blamed the president’s poor showing not on his cognitive decline but on high-ranking staff who were responsible for helping Biden prep for the debate. The family urged the president to fire or at least demote them.
Sources familiar with the discussions said the Biden family suggested that the staffers failed to prepare the president to shift his focus to attacking Trump. They complained that Biden got bogged down trying to defend his record and failed to spend enough time outlining his vision for another term.
Family members also complained that the president, who spent nearly a week at Camp David before the debate, was not well-rested by the time he got to Atlanta on June 27.
Those facing the harshest criticism were Biden advisor Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal attorney who played the role of Trump during debate prep, and former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, the man who ran point on debate prep.
Following the Biden family’s attempts to toss staff under the bus for the president’s debate performance, anonymous staffers leaked alarming details to reporters at the New York Times, that highlighted some of Biden’s recent troubling “lapses.”
The sources claimed that during debate prep at Camp David, the president never started before 11:00 a.m. and his staff gave him time in the afternoons to take a nap.
In a CBS News poll conducted following the June 27 debate, 72 percent of respondents said Biden did not have the mental or cognitive ability to serve as president, a 7-point jump from a CBS News poll from early June.
