As hard as President Joe Biden and his allies try to shift the narrative of his widely panned debate performance against former President Donald Trump to being "one bad night" instead of a sign of the 81-year-old's apparent declining mental capacity, another hurdle has popped up.
Multiple people said they had concerns about Biden after personally watching him during a Juneteenth event at the White House just 17 days before the June 27 debate, ABC News reported Thursday.
Biden was described at the event as "aloof" and "stiff" and his speech as "garbled." One lawmaker said her assessment of the president came after she privately raised concerns to White House staffers months before — jokingly saying they could keep the president "stitched together" until the election in November.
"We didn't know quite what to make of it, but we thought that it was different and that it was — he seemed altered," Texas state Rep. Ron Reynolds told ABC News.
Reynolds was one of the first Democrats to call for Biden to withdraw from the race after watching the debate, during which Biden's halting speech, confused rambling, loss of concentration, stiff gait, and lack of facial animation raised alarms nationwide.
"Having seen him on the debate stage, it was characteristic of what I witnessed that evening at the White House," Reynolds told ABC News. "Unfortunately, it reminded me that it was maybe not a one-off or just a bad night."
The news comes on the heels of actor George Clooney on Wednesday calling for Biden to leave the race in a column for The New York Times, nearly a month after his personal experience with him while playing host to a $30 million fundraiser in Los Angeles.
"It's devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe 'big F-ing deal' Biden of 2010," Clooney wrote. "He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate."
Clips of Biden appearing to freeze while in the front row of the White House during the Juneteenth event — while others noticeably danced around him — went viral on social media. But a White House spokesperson told a media outlet that Republicans were "falsely claim[ing] someone who never stops moving in a clip 'froze' because they simply weren't dancing. There are others in the video doing the same."
Another attendee, who formerly worked in the Obama administration, said the viral moment of Biden appearing to freeze didn't bother him — but Biden's brief remarks on stage at the event did. He said they were "concerning" to him and others nearby.
"He was garbled and low-energy, and he didn't look great," said the former Obama official, who agreed to speak to ABC News anonymously in order to speak freely.
"I've seen him stutter; it wasn't that. It wasn't messing a word up, which happens to all of us," the attendee said. "It was more just really low-energy, garbled words, hard to understand. And he spoke super briefly, because it was clear he was just not up to it that day."
The former official said concerns about Biden "absolutely" became a topic of conversation at the event. "People around us were immediately like, 'Oof.'"
The former official also echoed the sentiment that seeing Biden's debate performance made them think back to that night at the White House.