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“He totally fucked us.” Biden cost Democrats the 2024 race, Party insiders tell Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Plus:
Illustration by Jared Bartman
How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump
At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?
It was supposed to be another blockbuster fund-raiser for Joe Biden’s reëlection campaign. Led by George Clooney and the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, the event, on June 15th, would bring the President onstage with Obama and Jimmy Kimmel, in front of an audience of thousands of donors. But when Clooney met Biden backstage he was shocked by the appearance of a man he had known for years. More troubling for the actor was that Biden didn’t even seem to recognize him at all.
Fresh off a long flight from the G-7 leaders’ summit in Italy, the President appeared “severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write, in a stunning behind-the-scenes report of that night, drawn from their forthcoming book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” “It was like watching someone who was not alive,” a Hollywood V.I.P. recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.” The New Yorker has the exclusive full excerpt.
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Things I learned by embedding with the tourists: the Ramones loved Yoo-hoo, Peter Stuyvesant was uptight, and how to do “a quick Donald Trump dance.”
Patricia Marx loves a guided tour—a “CliffsNotes condensation of a place.” And yet, it was only recently, when she was reporting a piece for the New York Issue, that she let herself be a tourist in the city where she’s lived for forty years. In the course of a few weeks she trekked through the streets of Hasidic Williamsburg, learned about the East Village’s punk-rock history, visited a restored antebellum day resort, rode in a Subaru through Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, and more. Read or listen to the story »
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P.S. With news that the President may soon accept a four-hundred-million-dollar jet from Qatar (definitely not a Trojan horse!), revisit this classic Shouts & Murmurs on the kinds of people who might want to hitch a ride on Trump’s plane. ✈️
