Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described a Democratic “firing squad” forcing her boss out of the presidential race. “I had never seen a party do that in the way that they did,” she said at the Harvard Institute of Politics. “And it was hurtful and sad to see that happening. A firing squad around a person who I believe was a true patriot, a person who I believe did everything he can for this country.”

“Now lots of people have terrible debates,” top former Biden adviser Michael Donilon said at the same forum, mentioning President Donald Trump and former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. “Usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind. But that’s what happened here. It melted down.”

These takes from Biden loyalists have circulated amid news that journalists Alex Thompson of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN are publishing a book, due out in May, titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Tapper was a co-moderator of the Biden-Trump debate and has faced questions about his own handling of the Biden age question in the past.

Biden held an early debate with Trump to shore up Democrats’ confidence in his ability to wage an effective reelection campaign. Instead, the debate was a disaster that produced the opposite result. Democrats who had been nervous about Biden were now apoplectic and those who had believed he was fine were deeply shocked.

Until Democrats were ready to show Biden the door after the debate, the tone of most media coverage suggested that questions about his age, mental acuity, and overall fitness for office were largely the product of partisan deception. When the Wall Street Journal reported that Biden was starting to show his age even behind closed doors — Democrats often maintained that is where the 46th president really shined — the newspaper was slammed for relying too heavily on Republicans for on-the-record quotes.

Then, when Biden became a clear political liability for Democrats, the coverage turned notably more hostile, and stories began to stream out detailing concerns about his advanced age. Already the oldest president in history, Biden was seeking a second term that would keep him in the Oval Office past his 86th birthday. Democrats were now ready to pull the plug on this experiment, fearing a landslide loss in November.

Rank-and-file Democrats thought Biden was too old even before he decided to run for reelection, much less enter a pre-convention debate against Trump. A 2022 New York Times-Siena College poll found that 94% of Democrats under 30 wanted a different presidential nominee. “I’m just going to come out and say it: I want younger blood,” a 38-year-old preschool teacher in northern Michigan told the newspaper at the time. “I am so tired of all old people running our country. I don’t want someone knocking on death’s door.”

Occasionally, this sentiment was expressed even by elite Democrats. “The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” David Axelrod, a longtime senior adviser to Obama, said in June 2022. “He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality.”

The second part of Axelrod’s quote indicated that the Democratic strategist wasn’t ready to question Biden’s ability to serve. It was nevertheless an early warning sign that Obamaworld might cut bait if Biden faltered.

Deeper anxieties about whether Biden was in decline were mostly sequestered in the conservative media. Other outlets amplified the Biden White House’s spin that videos of him wandering around aimlessly or giving barely coherent answers to questions were deceptively edited “cheap fakes.”

The New York Times ran a story about Biden being plagued by “the distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”

“A New York Times review of these videos found that some were short and taken out of context, while other clips were cropped in a way that omitted crucial details when compared to additional footage,” the outlet concluded.

Both the Washington Post and NBC News defended an eyebrow-raising Biden Juneteenth appearance shortly before the debate by saying the then-president doesn’t dance. The Washington Post gave conservatives and Republicans circulating the clips “four Pinnochios” in a piece headlined “‘Cheapfake Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” while NBC’s headline was “Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up.” 

An Associated Press fact-checker took issue with footage showing Obama gently leading Biden off the stage at a Hollywood fundraiser, which soon became an apt metaphor for the 2024 presidential campaign. But actor George Clooney later wrote in an op-ed that the Biden he personally saw at this particular event was “the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” 

All these arguments are returning as the media faces scrutiny over how it covers the current administration and Democrats plot their return to power.

DEMOCRATS WEIGH CHANGE IN STRATEGY TO AVOID MIDTERM AND 2028 DEFEATS

That Biden should never have attempted to run for reelection is now the conventional wisdom, though his loyalists point to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat as a sign he was abandoned prematurely. “He believed he was the best person to beat Trump, and the truth is, as we sit here today, he is the only person who has ever beat Trump,” Donilon recently said of Biden. “No one else has ever done it.”  

The recriminations of the 2024 campaign continue.