By Noah Rothman
Thursday, April 03, 2025
Travel back with me to January 2023. Something called
“bathleisure” was the fashion trend of the age. Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero”
topped the charts, and Netflix’s original movie You People, a woke
reimagining of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, streamed to an inexplicably
large number of households. And in the White House, Jeff Zeints’s assumption of
the chief of staff role from Ron Klain produced a minor revolt among staffers
who described themselves, without any apparent self-consciousness, as “Klainiacs.” It was an embarrassing time.
Our present may be no less mortifying, but we are blessed
insofar as the press has no incentive to soft-pedal, massage, or cover up the
humiliations to which we’re subjected on a semi-regular basis. Now, with
sufficient distance from the Biden administration, the truth can finally be
told — albeit only in exchange for a hefty book advance.
Authors have begun publishing long-anticipated
behind-the-scenes looks at how the 46th president’s political operation managed
its decrepit principal. The conclusion that observers are likely to draw from
their reflections is that Klain was not the deft political maneuverer his
acolytes made him out to be.
For example, Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat
Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History reveals
that, despite his perfunctory public statements to the contrary, Klain knew
the risks his party was running by renominating Biden.
An excerpt via The Guardian discloses Klain’s true thoughts as he
settled into his new role as informal campaign adviser ahead of 2024’s
presidential debates. Klain is said to have been “startled” by how the
president seemed “so exhausted and out of it.” Biden’s former chief of staff
expressed exasperation at “how out of touch with American politics he was,” and
how difficult debate preparation was for a president who couldn’t manage to
soldier through even half of a 90-minute practice debate.
“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,”
Whipple writes. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally
televised disaster.” It was, but the spectacle might have been avoided if Klain
and those in his orbit hadn’t kept their concerns to themselves. Today, we’re
expected to believe that Klain not only foresaw the disaster Democrats were
courting but did his utmost to avoid it:
According to Klain, it turned out
that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the
back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed
about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as
president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his
argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other
than finish the job.”
Indeed, according to Whipple, Klain tried to communicate
to the president what his reelection message should be and even the policies he
should support — an initiative that reportedly encountered thoughtless
resistance from the infirm president.
Klain objects to the author’s “framing” of his conduct.
“My point wasn’t that the president lacked mental acuity,” he told Politico in his own defense. “He was out of it because
he had been [sidelined], not because he lacked capacity.” That line strains
credulity, but no more than Klain’s unconvincing defenses of the president’s
cognitive faculties ahead of the debate that scuttled Biden’s political career.
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