Just who decided that a June debate would work to Joe Biden's advantage? Did it come as a grand conspiracy to remove a doddering incumbent from a nomination he'd won and pull a switch to trip up Donald Trump? And if not, who's to blame for Biden's exit?

To be honest, I assumed we'd have to wait until memoir season in 2026 to get any answers to these questions. Instead, longtime Obama-Biden political adviser Anita Dunn has decided to go public with the answers to the biggest political mystery in America since John Kerry chose ambulance-chaser John Edwards as a running mate. And Dunn pulls no punches, especially on the last question.

According to Dunn in her interview with Politico, Nancy Pelosi stabbed Biden in the back just when it appeared he'd ridden out the debate damage:

That Monday was the Supreme Court opinion, just so people have the timeline. You’re saying that that next week is when it started picking up?

Yes. And the data still didn’t support this at all. We were looking at it and we were not seeing huge changes. But we were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative. And nobody was covering Trump whatsoever. I mean, Donald Trump was out there doing and saying whatever he wanted to do and the press was like, “We don’t care.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is still governing. He’s still doing all this important stuff. He’s out there campaigning. I went to Wisconsin with him for an event, and people felt very strongly about the bullying. They didn’t like it and voters didn’t like it. They felt that it was unfair and that it was wrong. So you had a lot of different things going on here. You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public.

Are you talking about senators and House members? Or do you mean like when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate?

Absolutely.

Does this sound revisionist? It's not, and Dunn is more accurate in her recollection than people might think. I've pointed out the same thing, based on the RCP polling aggregate average in the presidential race. The debate did more damage than Dunn allows, but not much more. Biden's polling average dipped below 44% for the first time since the winter, when the SOTU helped boost him again, but it had rebounded back (44.8%) to almost the same level as the day of the debate (44.9%) by July 21. Here's the chart:

Trump had soared to his highest average in six months, but that was clearly due more to his surviving the assassination attempt than the debate. Biden's team probably expected that to come back to his previous level at some point, perhaps after the conventions when Trump and Biden could do another debate and potentially even the score. It certainly wasn't a data set that pointed to a collapse, but instead more of a hiccup that was already played out.

However, Dunn does seem to remain in denial about just what the public saw in that debate. Whereas the rest of the country saw a man lost in the conversation and barely cognizant of it, Dunn just saw a man with a cold. She insisted that Biden rebounded after the first half-hour and did well in a personal appearance later that night. That clearly doesn't match up with the doddering figure who gaped, unfocused and staring off stage, while Trump answered questions in the format that Biden and his team insisted on using. It also didn't match up with the old man who needed his wife's assistance to get off the stage at the end, either.

Regardless, Pelosi deprived Biden of the opportunity to make the case, Dunn tells Politico. And what's worse, she and the party donors negated fifty state primaries and 14 million voters while professing to be acting in defense of democracy:

Key moments where people made the decision when it looked like we were reaching a point where we would fight our way through it. I had a lot of Republican friends who were sending me texts during this period saying, “Your party is insane.” They were saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this. Our party closes ranks. You know, you fight it through. You have a 24-hour news cycle. He had a bad debate, and you move on.”

They could not believe what was going on here. And then you had this decision that the Democratic Party made to ignore their primary voters and ignore their primary process, and that was a very donor-driven thing.

Dunn rejects the idea that this was a coup, in large part because she claims Kamala Harris remained loyal in support of Biden staying in the race until Biden himself chose to withdraw. She also rejects the claim that the early debate was a set-up to force Biden out of the race. She calls those conspiracy theories "totally ludicrous," arguing that the people who crafted that strategy are long-term Biden loyalists. 

So why choose a June debate? Unlike in other cycles, the race had been set for months and both parties had been in general-election mode anyway, Dunn explains. They wanted to get an early start in forcing Trump on the defensive, in part because Dunn acknowledges that Trump has picked more competent campaign runners this time than he had in 2020. Taking Trump down early would make it easier to campaign in the fall ... or so they thought.

That sounds fanciful as well, but it also sounds like the kind of decision-making that takes place around Joe Biden, too. Dunn insists that Biden hasn't lost a step mentally, which is all but gaslighting at this point, but it could still just be denial on Dunn's part. But clearly she sees Pelosi as the author of Biden's demise as a candidate, and just as clearly she isn't in the mood to forgive either. How that plays with Kamala Harris' campaign while Dunn plays a leading role remains to be seen.