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Michael LaRosa, longtime press secretary for First Lady Jill Biden, has revealed in a recent interview that the Joe Biden administration "gaslighted" the American public by "covering up" the concerns regarding the oldest President's age and health during his reelection campaign.
Knewz.com has learned that LaRosa admitted that the Biden campaign was aware "from day one" that the 81-year-old President's age "was an issue."
"From the moment I joined the campaign in the fall of 2019, it was a problem," LaRosa said in the interview.
Concerns regarding Biden's age and capability to run for Office were raised every time he made a verbal gaffe on the campaign circuit, with President Donald Trump making it one of the key points of his Presidential campaign.
However, the dissenting voices had never been as loud as they were after the first Presidential debate—an event that cemented the concerns about Biden's age and reportedly deteriorating cognitive abilities.
While talking about border security at the debate – a rather crucial topic for this year's presidential election – Biden's statement became increasingly unintelligible, with Trump grabbing the chance to reply: "I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either."
Another notable example was when he tried to respond to a question about the national debt, and he trailed off toward the end of his response and ended his statement with another one of his verbal gaffes, saying, "We finally beat Medicare."
Trump immediately pounced on the opportunity when it was his turn to respond: "Well he's right, he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death and he's destroying Medicare."
Notably, Biden's performance at the June 27 debate led to prominent Democrats calling on him to take his name out of the running.
Hollywood megastar George Clooney also penned his concerns regarding Biden's advancing age and his performance at the June 27 Presidential debate, conveying his worries as an ardent Democrat supporter.
"We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate," Clooney wrote in his guest essay for The New York Times.
"This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly," Clooney said at the time.
However, prior to the former President bowing out of the Presidential race, the Biden campaign tried its best to counter the concerns regarding his advancing age, although LaRosa believes it would be a little "harsh" to call it a cover-up.
"Calling it a cover-up is a little harsh and exaggerated. Every politician, every human being, tries to cover up their age. We all wear makeup on TV... So we were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue. From the moment I joined the campaign in the fall of 2019, it was a problem," he said.
LaRosa further said at a Science Institute at American University seminar on Wednesday, February 26:
"There are some things that are true, I mean, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling. And I will use the term gaslighting because that’s what they were doing, the campaign, former colleagues. The message to everybody was to make sure that you tell people it’s too early."
He also said in the PUCK interview:
"The message to everybody was to make sure you tell people, “It’s too early. These polls don’t mean anything.” Then for about a year and a half, the numbers never moved, and by denying the data that was out there publicly, by denying and undermining the really insightful journalism that The New York Times was doing, that you were doing, and all of the free press, they were actually demeaning a lot of those people."
"... The point is that they did do a lot of gaslighting. If you were watching MSNBC, you probably believed them. But if you were consuming information, consuming data, and looking at it objectively, and trying to interpret it and process it objectively, none of it was surprising," LaRosa added.
Despite the White House trying to uphold the image of Biden's "good health" in front of the public during his reelection campaign, LaRosa revealed that the former president's aides were "scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, unrehearsed, unpracticed, unchoreographed anything" ahead of the elections.
"[Biden] loves TV. He loves doing stuff. It was the orbit that didn’t trust the candidate. Biden needed the press, but when he needed the press the most, they didn’t trust him. And then the press put their foot on the gas and never took it off, and he was politically dead in a month," he added.