1 month ago
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Aides to former President Joe Biden felt that they were justified in doing "undemocratic things" because President Donald Trump, to them, was an "existential threat to democracy" if he became president, according to Axios reporter Alex Thompson.
Thompson, one of the co-authors of the book "Original Sin" along with CNN's Jake Tapper, made the claim on Fox News Sunday. He told the network about the thinking of a staffer from the Biden administration, “If you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things."
Thompson went on to cite a quote from an aide that he had spoken to from his reporting that admitted that Biden "just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years."
“He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while," Thompson said of the aide's comments in the book. “His aides could pick up the slack. When you’re voting for president, you’re voting for the aides around him."
The report from Thompson comes as even more questions regarding Biden's fitness for office have come into question since he was diagnosed with stage-4 prostate cancer, an illness that some doctors said would have been around when he assumed the presidency in 2020.
Along with the diagnosis and the book from Thompson and Tapper, audio of Biden speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur for an investigation into Biden having classified documents revealed that the president struggled to carry on a long conversation as far back as October 2023, when the interview took place.
Some Democrats, as well as media pundits, have attempted to distance themselves from comments they made defending Biden, making similar claims that he was "sharp as a tack" leading up to the 2024 election.
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