Inside the crucial days leading up to Biden’s debate disaster

An exhausted president with a bad cold, according to aides. A rushed final 36 hours of preparation at Camp David leading to a disastrous debate. And now, a presidency in crisis.

A week after Joe Biden's debate performance sent the Democratic Party into panic over his age, health and viability in November's election, the White House and campaign have offered shifting explanations about concerns in the days leading up to the debate — a damage control effort that's fallen flat.

Now, people with direct knowledge of his debate prep process are providing a more detailed picture of the days leading up to Biden’s disastrous debate last week, clarifying the roles and responsibilities of aides and saying now — for the first time — that Biden’s illness was more physically uncomfortable and disruptive to debate preparations than Biden advisers let on last week.

POLITICO spoke to nearly a dozen people familiar with the debate preparation process, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.

Meanwhile, the second-guessing over Biden’s debate prep among his family members, which the president has denied, and some donors and aides outside his close senior team has intensified. Some critics are focusing on two aides who are more recent members of an inner circle that goes back 40 years but who did not in fact have a leading role in that process: senior adviser Anita Dunn, who played CNN anchor Dana Bash in mock debates, and her husband and Biden personal attorney, Bob Bauer, who played Trump.

And after some Biden family members criticized top advisers and called for their ouster privately last Sunday, longtime aides to the president are now raising concerns about Hunter Biden's new presence alongside the president in meetings.

Stubbornly dismissive of growing questions about Biden’s age, stamina and mental acuity, several aides and the president himself have continued to blame the cold he was suffering through in the lead-up to the debate.

Biden woke up with a bad cold two days before the debate and could barely speak, according to five people with knowledge of the prep sessions at Camp David. He did a short mock debate with a small group of aides before going back to his room to rest, canceling the additional prep sessions that day.

As a result, the following day’s schedule — Wednesday, July 26 — was jam-packed as aides tried to make up for the lost day. Staffers held another prep session Thursday before the president flew to Atlanta for the debate that night. And while some aides regret that Thursday session in hindsight, none of them anticipated Biden’s catastrophic performance.

“Watching his first answer, I thought: He’s visibly nervous. It was the combination of nerves, the cramming in of all the prep at the end and then the cold,” said one of the people familiar with the preparations. “That’s how we got where we are.”

Despite these aides’ characterization of Biden as having been struck nearly speechless by a cold, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a briefing this week that Biden had not been examined by a doctor since his last annual physical in February. Biden later acknowledged in a meeting with Democratic governors that he had been seen by a doctor after the debate.

Yet his staff made no mention of Biden’s cold until the debate was nearing the hour mark — when his shaky responses made the information seem like an excuse.

While the president has outwardly shown resolve to move forward, he has privately expressed doubt that he can recover, according to two people familiar with internal conversations. In Biden’s public comments since the debate, he has pointed to his run of foreign travel in the weeks before the debate but, mostly, tried to shoulder the blame himself, admitting that he “didn’t listen to my staff” and that he “screwed up” or had a “bad night.”

But Biden’s responses do little to explain why his campaign and staff shifted their explanations or seemingly omitted key details about Biden’s health, including his illness just days before the debate that kept him from preparing for a day.

The second-guessing over Biden’s debate prep in recent days is also focusing on some senior advisers, who have come under attack from donors and especially from Hunter, who blames them for his father’s debate performance and remains angry about his conviction last month on federal gun charges.

According to five people familiar with the debate prep, the president spent the majority of the time with three people: former chief of staff Ron Klain and longtime aides Mike Donilon and Bruce Reed. That began with short sessions going over policy areas and studying up on Trump, sessions that were slotted into the president’s schedule whenever there was time — when he was aboard Air Force One during his two June trips abroad, at the White House and then, with more intensity, during the six days he spent holed up at Camp David.

Biden and that troika of top aides arrived at Camp David the Saturday ahead of the debate. That evening, the campaign leaked the names of 14 people who would be on hand for debate prep. But the campaign did not note that most of them were not at Camp David yet and would only be there for one or two days. When The New York Times first reported on the list of names that Saturday, one aide listed, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, was posting on Instagram from a bar.

The full group had arrived by Monday, when Biden took part in two mock debates. The first, which ran about 45 minutes, took place in the Shangri La theater. A second that evening, which lasted an hour, took place in a hangar where a full debate set with lecterns had been set up. Dunn and White House communications director Ben LaBolt sat as moderators at a table.

The rest of the staff sat at a long table behind them. Klain and Donilon sat at their own smaller table closer to the action.

When they’d wrapped, Biden, his voice already somewhat raspy, walked over to the long table of aides and solicited feedback from everyone, including the person operating the video camera that had been trained on him. A number of aides urged him to be more aggressive in confronting Trump, the five people said.

“He seemed happy,” one of those people said of Biden, who retreated to his cabin as staffers gathered in the Shangri La bar. “Everyone was in a good place.”

When Biden awoke the next morning, however, he had a severe cold. He took a Covid test — negative — and then another. Negative. Aides attempted another mock debate inside the theater but it was cut short and the rest of the day was mostly a wash as the president rested.

Biden’s voice remained shot Wednesday. But Klain, Donilon and Reed, who keep the schedule fluid, were looking to make up for the lost day of prep and squeezed in a number of small huddles on policy as well as a scaled down mock debate in the theater. The people said there was never any serious consideration to postponing or canceling the debate, as aides assumed Biden would recover from the cold and giving Trump the opportunity to paint Biden as afraid of the confrontation was unthinkable.

On Thursday morning, his voice was marginally better. Staff added one last-minute prep session to the schedule before the flight to Atlanta. Following the debate meltdown, some involved in the process have acknowledged to one another that perhaps they should have instead given Biden more time to recover from his illness.

"All it did was wear him out and muddle things," said one of the people.

Immediately after the debate, allies in the spin room sought to paper over the debate itself by framing the side-by-side with Trump as a choice between two very different agendas and records. On CNN, former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield bluntly called the president’s performance “disappointing” and acknowledged it would only deepen concerns about his age and stamina. But on the same network moments later, Vice President Kamala Harris, who hadn’t been involved in debate prep at Camp David and spent debate night in Los Angeles, offered a forceful defense of Biden. And the following day, Biden’s more vigorous remarks at a rally in North Carolina, where he spoke about his age and limitations while vowing to rebound, left staffers somewhat heartened.

But the questions about Biden’s candidacy were only just beginning. As the party’s elder statesmen, congressional leaders and frontline lawmakers considered the situation, finger pointing and recriminations were overtaking the campaign. Some of the leaks began the following Sunday when the president, after a two-day post-debate campaign swing, returned to Camp David for a family photo shoot. Biden’s family, POLITICO and other outlets reported, was blaming top aides for his poor performance even though he has told aides neither he nor his family faults them.

As the week played out, Biden returned to the White House with his son Hunter, who has continued to push privately for the ouster of Dunn and Bauer, two people familiar with the matter said, sitting in on meetings and destabilizing what has been a relatively tight-knit team.

"We can't blame the president for listening to his son, especially with his future on the line," said one of the people familiar. "But we're not sure it's always helpful."

In a statement, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said, “The President and First Lady have full confidence in their team, including Anita and Bob. There is absolutely no truth to these unfounded and insulting rumors.”

Campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt echoed Zients in a statement asserting Biden “maintains confidence in his advisers. And there are no changes expected.”

Dunn, of course, has been a powerful force within the president’s inner circle and remains involved in campaign matters from her second floor office at the White House. She was a strong proponent of the strategy that circumvented the Commission on Presidential Debates and moved up the first debate from September to June in an effort to shake up the race. But she was not alone. In fact, Biden’s top aides all agreed on that approach, a person familiar with the matter said.

The shakeup that resulted was bigger than most expected — and not to Biden’s benefit. But four people with knowledge of the debate prep insist that the process wasn’t much different than it’s been on other campaigns.

“This was actually just a very traditional process done by a lot of people who have done this before,” one of those people said. “Sometimes debates go well and sometimes they don’t.”