President Joe Biden was unable to recall words and phrases and he had trouble standing at campaign fundraisers more than a year prior to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing him out of the 2024 presidential race. Some witnesses said he was “frighteningly awful” and looked like a “senile grandfather,” Bob Woodward has revealed in his newly released book, “War.”

At a June 2023 Democratic fundraiser in California’s Silicon Valley, Biden “could not wait to sit down and only took two pre-arranged questions,” a Democratic donor revealed in the book, according to the New York Post. The president’s crib notes with ready-made answers did not help much, as Biden, then 80, had obvious difficulty remembering what issue he was addressing and strayed from his talking points, attendees said.

“It was ‘like your 87-year-old senile grandfather,’ wandering around the room, saying to women guests, ‘your eyes are so beautiful,'” Woodward wrote, quoting one of the attendees at an event hosted by Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.

Then, on June 27, 2023, husband-and-wife philanthropists Michael and Susie Gelman hosted a “Meet the President” fundraiser at their Maryland home. “He never completed a sentence,” said Liberties Journal President Bill Reichblum, one attendee. “He would start to talk about something, jump somewhere else. He told the same story three times in exactly the same way and it meandered so much … Frankly, my impression was there were times it was as though we didn’t exist. He was just rambling and talking as to what came into his head.”

Until he abruptly left the presidential race, Biden would frequently respond to concerns about his age and evident mental decline with abject dismissal or with the challenge of “watch me” as he suggested that age had not slowed him down.

But that facade burst 12 months after the Maryland appearance when the world saw the president of the United States confused and tongue-tied in a debate with former President Donald Trump that was both a seminal night in Biden’s life and the end of his hopes of being reelected as president.

Woodward confirms in the book that Biden’s closest aides seemed to have been in a state of denial before Biden’s disastrous debate performance and suggested talk of Biden’s growing dementia was all vicious Republican attacks and video footage of the president acknowledging people at events who were either not there or dead was nothing but “cheap fakes.”

But not everyone in the Democratic camp was willing to ignore Biden’s obvious decline. “You’re f*cking up your campaign,” a Hollywood executive told the president, according to Woodward. “Every time you get out and walk, people think ‘old.'”

Vice President Kamala Harris continues to downplay Biden’s mental state and pretends he had other reasons for deprecating the presidential race. “Joe Biden is extremely accomplished, experienced and capable in every way,” Harris told NBC News’ Hallie Jackson Tuesday, the Post noted. “I have worked with Joe Biden … hours and hours and hours over these four years,” she insisted. “I speak not only with sincerity but with a real, first-hand account of watching him do this work.” First Lady Jill Biden, who has defended her husband, has admitted that not completing his run for a second term was the “right call.”