President Biden won the White House because the coronavirus let him hide in his basement, protecting his campaign from his greatest responsibility – the candidate himself, says a new book.
Biden’s camp partly followed the strategy of “you put your dumb uncle in the basement”, referring to the Democratic candidate, according to “Lucky: How Joe Biden barely won the presidency. ”
Even former President Obama initially refused to support his 78-year-old former vice president and friend, fearing that he could become a “tragicomic caricature of an elderly politician taking his last breath”, if not protected from himself. says the book.
President Joe Biden talks about efforts to fight COVID-19 in the White House State Dining Room on Tuesday, March 2, 2021, in Washington.
(AP)
The authors of the work – Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amie Parnes of The Hill – repeatedly write, “the stars have lined up” for Biden, a former loser and former presidential candidate who succeeded in his third attempt despite everything.
And no one was more taken aback than the Trump camp.
The tome says that in May, Trump watched Biden give an interview to CNN and then asked top aide Kellyanne Conway: “What do you think?”
Conway replied, “I think if we lose to him, we will be pathetic,” says the book.
Trump laughed, say the authors of the book, who also wrote “Shattered” about Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential candidacy in 2016.
“Until the COVID thing happened, we were winning four hundred electoral votes,” a source familiar with Trump’s internal numbers around February 2020 told the authors.
Even one of Biden’s top advisers, Anita Dunn, allegedly said to an associate at one point, “COVID was the best thing that happened to him.”
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In mid-March 2020, Biden’s team converted the basement of his home in Wilmington, Del., Into an improvised studio from which he could safely issue statements.
“They used the coronavirus as an excuse to keep it in the basement, and it was smart,” a Trump adviser told the authors.
“Biden managed to hide his biggest weakness, which is himself. And he did it with an excuse that seemed responsible.”
But Biden’s broadcast on the night of the March 17 primary was simply bizarre, the book says.
“There was a quality of video hostage in the broadcast. It was cloudy and dark ”, describes the book.
“As he spoke, there was a slight delay, putting Biden’s words out of sync with the movements of his mouth. Was this the guy who would send Donald Trump to Mar-a-Lago forever?”
A Biden advisor told the authors, “I cringed all the time. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. ”
Meanwhile, Obama “seemed to be in love with former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke” as a presidential candidate, although he eventually put his influence on his former vice president, who he once compared to a brother, says the book.
And in the fall, Trump became “his own invisible enemy,” says the book.
“With less than a month to go before the election, Trump had just emerged from a debate in which he managed to make his opponent look more presidential, he was running low on money, he was discouraging Republicans from voting by mail. He contracted a disease that killed more than two hundred thousand of his fellow Americans and was ignoring the advice to show just one gram of humanity ”, write the authors.
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“He couldn’t see that he was getting hurt. ”
In a month, Biden would have won the presidency with “a bland message and a blank agenda,” say the authors.
The president’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post on Tuesday.
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