“Mr Biden ... what do you call him now? Do you still call him president?” wondered Denzel Washington.
One of Hollywood’s last titans was talking after his lead performance in Othello, the centre-point of Broadway right now with minimalist staging and maximal pricing ($900 for the beautiful-people seats).
The former first couple, Jill and Joe Biden, made what has been, since the return to the White House of Donald Trump, a rare public appearance by attending a performance last week. Being an ex-president has revivified him. Tuxedoed and relaxed, Biden had shaken off the haunted, vacant expressions that defined his final months in office.
But still, the secrets and the tattletale whispers will not stop. Two new books on last year’s unprecedented presidential election share one word in their respective titles: “wildest”.
Much of the drama of that story inevitably revolves around the mad and macabre three weeks starting with Biden’s jaw-dropping debate performance in Atlanta and his decision, after a soul-searching weekend of warm, spitting rain at his Rehoboth Beach summer home, to exit the race.
Those events bracketed America’s latest brush with the nightmare of presidential assassination: the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear and a few seconds of violence that left both the would-be assassin and an innocent Republican supporter, Corey Comperatore, dead after a midsummer rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The details of the books revolve around the Democrats’ internal fragmenting of faith in Biden’s ability to win the race, and the uncomfortable sense that their president was cocooned from close outside scrutiny by his family and immediate staff. The hot gossip comes from inside sources rather than direct interviews with the key protagonists: that Nancy Pelosi tried to dissuade Biden from taking Trump on in a direct debate; that the president himself was champing at the bit, both because he believed he could best Trump and because, even then, the data was showing an alarming drop in his public support and that he needed to make a dramatic statement.
He did that in Atlanta, but in the most catastrophic way possible. One of the most damning passages in Chris Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, chronicles the days leading to that CNN debate, as told by Ron Klain, the former adviser who returned last summer to help him prepare. Halfway through a session in the presidential cabin in Aspen Lodge, Biden took a break, went outside and lay on a pool lounger and instantly fell asleep through pure exhaustion.
“We sat around the table,” Klain recalls in the book. ‘[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.‘”
It was always Biden’s contention that his on-screen vacuity was indeed attributable to exhaustion and a cold. He had been travelling intensively in Europe and then appeared in Los Angeles for the fundraiser during which George Clooney first became concerned that Biden no longer possessed the vitality required to continue, leading to his infamous New York Times opinion piece. Whipple told Politico he believes that many of those closest to Biden “were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe”.
Trump’s tireless prosecution of the idea that Biden was unfit for office continued before and after the election and still preoccupies the current administration.
The most recent aspersion related to Biden’s use of an auto-pen to sign the slew of presidential pardons as he left office. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mused in the briefing room about the subject. “I think journalists in this room should be asking about whether or not the former president of the United States, whom I think we can finally agree was cognitively impaired, as evidenced by his disastrous debate performance ... did the president even know about these pardons?”
A year ago, her predecessor, Karine Jean-Pierre, faced almost weekly inquisitions about the state of her president’s mental acuity. By the end she sounded exhausted and saddened as she batted them away week after week.
The subsequent internal tensions caused by the reluctance of grandees such as Barack Obama to immediately row in behind Kamala Harris, and the split opinion on her suitability as a candidate, are the stuff of woulda-coulda-shoulda for the Democrats.
Biden has, wisely, maintained a radio silence about it all. It is believed he is working on a memoir of his own. It might be more sensible for him to just let sleeping dogs lie and trust time and the future biographers to evaluate his 50-year legacy rather than his one-night nightmare. “A real man of integrity,” Washington said after the show.
There’s that line Biden, in the darkness of the theatre, would have heard Washington deliver as Othello: “Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it without a prompter.”
He didn’t, and he will never stop paying the price.
