In an article by which it practically admit what everyone could see about Biden’s presidency in the US, the Wall Street Journal has gone on to claim in an op-ed that associates of the US president and White House officials knew from the very first day the 82-year-old Democrat was in office that there was a problem with his mental state.

According to the report, White House officials from the first day Joe Biden was in Washington, D.C., put up a firewall to hide the US president’s “apparent mental decline.”

As the WSJ notes, the lack of access to the country’s oldest president was well known in Washington – with Biden giving the fewest lengthy press conferences in modern history and frequently falling into gaffes on the podium when he did appear.

The publication, which cited testimony from Democratic congressmen, party donors and White House staffers, said the presidential staff’s first move was made before Biden took office amid the COVID-19 pandemic by limiting his personal contacts in January 2021.

The good days and the bad days

The next step was making adjustments to his daily schedule when Biden seemed tired or when he had accidents. As the article states, meetings through the spring of 2021 were adjusted “to accommodate Biden’s good and bad days.”

Typical is a national security official’s line to an adviser to the American president at the time: “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day, so we’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

It was also common for Biden’s schedule of meetings to be changed to take place later in the day, a practice revealed after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, when associates admitted that the then-Democratic nominee was having difficulty operating for longer than a six-hour, a “window” that closed around 4 p.m.p.m. daily.

Short updates

The instructions to those briefing Biden were along the same lines. One-on-one meetings were to be short in duration and briefings were to be comprehensive, while as time went on, the US president’s meetings with top ministers such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin became less frequent. A White House official revealed that the tactic forced a member of the US cabinet to stop trying to meet Biden as all requests to do so had been turned down.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden’s protection plan included hiring a “voice coach” to make the US president sound louder.

Another aspect was also reportedly the removal of any negative mention of Biden in the daily briefings he received, resulting in the US president having no real insight into the public’s view of him, which in 2024 reached a 70-year low.

The meeting with the prosecutor

One of the incidents, according to the publication, that tested Biden’s mental toughness was his meeting with special prosecutor Robert Herr about what was later deemed “deliberate” retention of classified documents.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the person who pushed for the meeting was Biden himself in the hope that it would prove that the US president was more cooperative than Trump, then his rival in the 2024 presidential race.

But preparations for the meeting quickly turned into a headache. Preparation sessions lasted three hours a day and Biden was forgetting his “catchphrases” and had fluctuating energy levels, according to the report. A transcript released after the grueling, two-day session in October 2023 revealed that he forgot the year Bo, Biden’s son, died of brain cancer.

What the White House says in response

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates disputed what the report said, saying that “President Biden talks with members of his Cabinet every day and most members several times a week, staying close to them to implement key laws and strengthen our national security. President Biden leads a modern administration. Cabinet meetings are an important tradition, but the modern work environment means they may be fewer and less frequent.”