Joe Biden is out of office and out of the limelight. But his staff are still making waves.
Now an ex-Biden official admitted one truth about the Democrat Party’s complete collapse.
Biden Advisor Blasts Democrats for ‘Melting Down’ After Debate Disaster
A senior advisor to former President Joe Biden slammed the Democratic Party for its chaotic response following Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance against President Donald Trump. Despite calls for Biden to step aside, the advisor insists the former president should have remained the party’s nominee.
Biden’s stumbling delivery and frail voice during the CNN Presidential Debate sent shockwaves through the Democratic establishment. Panic spread quickly as top party leaders demanded Biden withdraw from the race — a demand they got when Vice President Kamala Harris officially replaced him as the nominee on July 21.
Harris went on to lose the 2024 election to Trump, handing the Republican a decisive victory.
“Now, lots of people have terrible debates,” former Biden senior advisor Mike Donilon said during a discussion at Harvard University. “Lots of people have terrible debates. Usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind, but that’s what happened here. It melted down.”
The mainstream media wasted no time piling on. CNN and the BBC ran headlines branding Biden’s performance “disastrous” and “incoherent.”
CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson didn’t hold back, writing, “If Joe Biden loses November’s election, history will record that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency.” Collinson described Biden’s stiff shuffle onto the Atlanta debate stage as the opening act of what became a political catastrophe — one he called the weakest performance in televised debate history.
Even Biden’s longtime media allies couldn’t hide their dismay. New York Times columnist and Biden supporter Thomas Friedman confessed the debate made him “weep” and urged Biden to step down.
“I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime — precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election,” Friedman wrote.
Donilon, who has known Biden for over 40 years, didn’t mince words about the Democratic Party’s overreaction.
“I think the party lost its mind,” he said. “If you ask people about this period of time, they’ll tell you Biden was losing the polls, he was going to lose. … They were saying this in a margin-of-error race.”
According to Donilon, the panic wasn’t backed by the data. “If you actually go and look at the polling in the first couple of days after the debate, the margin between Trump and Biden got closer. It didn’t get bigger,” he pointed out.
He also referenced focus groups from the debate night. While participants believed Trump had the upper hand, they expressed deep concerns about both candidates.
“They will say they’re worried about Biden’s age, but they’ll also say something else,” Donilon said. “They were really worried about Trump. They were worried about the fact he said he wouldn’t accept the results of the election. They were worried that he said, ‘I had nothing to do with Jan. 6.’ The sense from him was that he was not on the side of people.”
From Donilon’s perspective, the media and party insiders blew Biden’s debate performance out of proportion.
“I said this to Biden the morning after the debate: Sometimes you can lose the campaign about the campaign,” he explained. “And that’s what happened to us.”
While defending Biden’s mental acuity, Donilon acknowledged that the botched Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 and soaring inflation were significant factors that undermined his presidency.
In the end, the Democratic Party’s frantic decision to oust Biden backfired — clearing the path for Trump’s return to the White House.
