Former President Biden’s aides considered the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair if he was reelected to a second term, an unreleased book authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson reveals.
“Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election,” the authors wrote in “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” according to a Tuesday report from Axios. His stride was heavily impacted by a deteriorating spine.
The book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” was informed by interviews after the 2024 election with over 200 people, many of them Democratic Party insiders.
Biden had several falls throughout his tenure in office. One of the most notable was during the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony in June 2023, where he fellon stage after tripping over a sandbag.
“Given Biden’s age, [his physician Kevin O’Connor] also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery,” Tapper and Thompson wrote.
In 2024, months before Biden’s debate with President Trump, O’Connor released a physical exam and wrote in a public memo that the president “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations,” the Associated Press reported.
But according to the Axios report, O’Connor lobbied for Biden to have more downtime in his schedule.
In his last couple of medical reports, O’Connor indicated that Biden’s gait was impacted by “significant spinal arthritis,” noted by Axios and reported by both Time and the New York Times.
Tapper and Thompson reported that Biden’s family and White House aides saw signs of decline that were not only physical but also mental, a claim that Biden has repeatedly refuted.
“They are wrong, there is nothing to sustain that,” Biden said during an appearance on ABC’s “The View” on May 8.
“I only dropped out because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party,” he later added.
