Former Obama aide, now Pod Save America host Dave Pfeiffer, said he saw President Joe Biden's cognitive decline in 2024, but brushed it off as old age and not as detrimental to the country.

During an episode of the podcast on Sunday, Pfeiffer described Biden's behavior at a reception he attended the weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) in April 2024, saying he repeated himself and seemed "old."

Pfeiffer seemed confident that Biden could function as president, but was concerned about a second term.

“I was at a White House reception and he was bad. He was quite bad in it. And he told the same story twice. He just seemed mostly old,” he added. “In no way did I look at that and say that man cannot do the job of president. I had real concerns that he could not do it for four more years.”

The brush-off

He brushed off Biden's apparent decline as due to it being a Friday after a busy, unusual week.

“I also thought to myself, ‘Well, it’s Friday, this is a super bizarre event, the night before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” he said. “I knew he was coming from speech prep and going back to speech prep on a Friday evening. Even [former President] Barack Obama was not a great communicator on a Friday evening.”

Pfeiffer said he believed those around Biden who told him he was not impaired, even after the Rober Hur special counsel report characterized him as an "elderly man with a poor memory."

“I trusted the people who I talked to, who said he was fine. And I also believed — and I said this at the time after the [special counsel] Robert Hur report came out is — that if Biden really was having these mental lapses all over town, everyone would know it,” he added.

Convenient narrative

Pfeiffer is among many in the media who are now trying to explain why they didn't report on or acknowledge Biden's cognitive decline before his disastrous July 2024 presidential debate and subsequent exit from the re-election campaign.

Some have been making excuses, and others are giving mea culpas, saying they should have said something about what they observed.

The same weekend Pfeiffer talked about at the WHCD, Axios's Alex Thompson also got to witness Biden's decline when he accepted an award at the dinner.

Thompson actually chastised fellow journalists and himself at this year's dinner for missing the boat and ignoring what they saw, unlike Pfeiffer and others.

It wasn't politically advantageous to admit anything before Biden stepped down from re-election.

Afterward, some realized they just seemed sycophantic and changed their stories. How convenient.