President Joe Biden's difficulties in last week's debate were not just a "one-off" incident but the continuance of a pattern that has been going on for the last year and a half as he has "good days, he has bad days," former Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein says his sources are telling him.
"People who have supported him, loved him, campaigned for him, see him often, say that in the last six months particularly, there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical infirmity," Bernstein, of Watergate fame and now a political analyst for CNN, told Anderson Cooper on Monday night.
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Those incidents have occurred at least 15-20 times, Bernstein said his sources, who he did not name, have told him. These included times when Biden has "lost his train of thought [and] can't pick it up again," and even one time at a fundraiser podium in New York City last June where he became "very stiff … as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis" and needed to have a chair brought for him.
"So we're clearly dealing with two sets of one person," he said. "And it really needs to be explored, according to the people I'm talking to. And I think an awful lot of major Democrats believe this, including some who have made statements to the contrary."
But then, during his address Monday night concerning the Supreme Court's ruling on immunity, Biden was "at his absolute best," said Bernstein.
He added that Biden's debate preparation was supervised by Ron Klain, who served as White House chief of staff under Biden from 2021 to 2023, and said that the people he spoke with have all voiced their concerns to Klain in the last year.
"I think that what these folks are saying and have been saying for a while is, yes, he's great when we see him, as we have tonight, but he also has these inexplicable moments that we are very concerned about, and you, Ron Klain, and the first family, we need to talk about this," said Bernstein.
Meanwhile, Bernstein said his sources have also told him that Biden has been "as sharp as he can be" in his national security meetings, where he has an " absolute command of the facts."
"You see the evidence of his being the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, of his work as vice president on foreign relations," he said. "We're clearly dealing with two sets of one person, and it really needs to be explored … there has been a marked deterioration in recent months. Somehow, it is up to journalists. It is up to Democrats, it is up to the Bidens to let us find out what occurred here and is it just something that's passing or is it something endemic?"
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Bernstein on Monday also commented on the Supreme Court's ruling on immunity, and said there are parallels between Trump and former President Richard Nixon, but said Trump went "much farther [with] his criminality" in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, incidents at the Capitol than Nixon went with Watergate.
And with the ruling, "you have a terrible situation in which any future president of the United States, but especially a Donald Trump who knows, we keep using the expression 'guardrails,' he's never seen a guardrail, that the court has now enabled presidents to have this extraordinary executive authority that is nowhere in the Constitution itself," said Bernstein.
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