This story is based on conversations with eight people who were involved in or briefed on the presidential debate preparation. All spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. Biden’s campaign declined to comment.
For a week, the president and more than a dozen aides have been holed up at Camp David to prepare for Thursday’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump. He practiced answers, met with policymakers and participated in mock debates with his personal attorney, Bob Bauer, playing Trump.
He had practiced his answers for every topic he was asked about on Thursday, including the final question about his age.
So aides were stunned by his actions. Many felt that they had never seen him collapse so dramatically. After all, Biden was a veteran of countless debates — as a senator, vice presidential candidate and presidential candidate. And they didn't understand why he gave a completely different answer to the age question than the one it had taken them more than a week to perfect.
The president wasn't just stumbling over words. He seemed to lose focus and was often unable to complete sentences. His voice was hoarse and thin, and when the debate ended, first lady Jill Biden appeared to help her husband down the stairs.
His performance sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party, prompting calls from some Democrats to oust him. In the 48 hours after the debate, Biden campaign officials sought to reassure supporters and donors, blaming the debate on “just a bad night” and promising that the president would stay in the race. The president should be judged by his 3½ years in office, they argued, not by his 90 minutes on stage.
But with another debate scheduled for September — a Biden campaign spokesman said the president would not back out — aides and allies are examining the president's preparation for last week's debate to see if they missed any signs of what was to come in CNN's Atlanta studio.
Biden’s aides have developed a tried-and-true formula over the years to prepare him for debates, a process overseen by Ron Klain, his first White House chief of staff and a longtime debate guru for Democratic presidential candidates. Early in the process, Biden often meets with Klain one on one or with a small group of aides to practice responses, sometimes writing his favorite responses on postcards — his way, aides say, of clarifying his thinking.
Assistants working on specific topics, such as national security or the economy, will participate in preparations for sessions focused on those topics. Finally, Biden will participate in mock debates, which are designed to mimic the actual event as closely as possible.
At Camp David, Biden took part in several such mock sessions, held in a movie theater and airplane hangar decorated to resemble the CNN studio. They were held at various times of the day, including at night when Biden sometimes appears to faint, and when the debate was scheduled to be held, officials said.
Some Biden officials speculated that the president was overprepared through days of preparation sessions and got into his own head. Others lamented that too many aides were part of the preparations, noting that the White House distributed a list of 18 officials accompanying the president to Camp David, which did not even include everyone.
Not all of these people were in the room with Biden the entire time, people familiar with the preparations said. But they still noted that there is a risk in having too many opinions, which can be contradictory and confusing.
As the debate began on Thursday, Biden’s top advisers, gathered in a waiting room at the CNN studios, knew immediately that the president had gotten off to a rocky start, stumbling over answers about the economy and ending his remarks about the national debt with a gaffe: “We finally defeated Medicare.” Trump seized on the gaffe.
Early in the debate, Biden officials told reporters that the president had a cold and a sore throat, and they tried to explain why his voice sounded weak and hoarse.
“We were asked about his hoarse voice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday. “We shared that he had a cold, we shared that he tested negative [for covid], and then we moved on. That is it. Obviously it was because of his voice when he spoke during the debate.”
Yet Biden's voice at a spirited campaign rally the next day showed no trace of the previous evening's hoarseness.
Biden’s aides and allies have fretted for months about whether he should participate in the traditional presidential debates at all. Some argued vigorously that he should not participate, worried that he was not up to the task and that Trump would dominate the showdown with his shouting and ranting.
Others thought Biden would look weak if he skipped a debate. And they predicted he would do well, pointing to the powerful delivery of his State of the Union address when he got into a rapid-fire exchange with Republican lawmakers who booed him.
The Biden campaign ultimately agreed to two debates, insisting that the events would take place on their terms: There would be no studio audience and each candidate's microphone would be muted when it was not their turn to speak. Some allies speculated afterward that those rules may have actually helped Trump by curbing his impulse to interrupt his opponent and play to the crowd, moves that seemed to deter television viewers in previous debates.
And Biden's aides demanded an unusually early date for the first meeting, hoping a strong performance would boost the president's campaign — and calculating that Biden would be given time to recover if he failed. Instead of boosting the campaign, the event has led to a wave of renewed calls for him to reconsider his candidacy.
On Thursday night, after Biden left the debate hall, he stopped by a Waffle House and told reporters he thought he was “doing well.” But in the hours that followed, the campaign tried to control the damage. Officials sought to reassure donors, allies warned against exaggerating the consequences of a bad night, and Biden himself debuted a new line addressing his age.
“I don't walk as easily as I used to,” he said Friday at a rollicking rally in Raleigh, N.C. “I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth.”
At a fundraiser later Friday, the first lady told donors that her husband had admitted something had gone wrong.
“After last night's debate he said, 'You know, Jill, I don't know what happened. I didn't feel great,'” she said. “And I said, 'Look, Joe, we're not going to let 90 minutes define the four years you're president.'”
Toward the end of his three-day swing, even the president publicly acknowledged that the evening had not gone his way.
“I understand the concerns after the debate. I get it – I didn't have a great night,” he said Saturday evening at a fundraiser in Red Bank, NJ. “But I'm going to fight harder.”
Michael Scherer in Washington contributed to this report.
