About a month before George Clooney poured gasoline on calls for President Biden to end his re-election bid, the 46th president left the famous actor “shaken to his core” by seeming not to recognize him at a fundraiser, according to a forthcoming book. 

The book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, is scheduled to be published on May 20. An excerpt of the book released on Tuesday sheds light on how “severe” the president’s “physical deterioration” was ahead of the 2024 election.

Besides Mr. Biden’s physical condition, the book also details concerns about his mental acuity. The New Yorker published another excerpt detailing Mr. Clooney’s dismay when he interacted with the president at a June 2024 fundraiser. Mr. Clooney would later pen an op-ed in the New York Times calling on the 46th president to drop out.

The book states that Mr. Biden was “taking tiny steps,” and an aide “seemed to be guiding him by the arm” at the event.

As the president greeted attendees, an aide told him, “You know George [Clooney].”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mr. Biden said. “Thank you for being here.”

According to the book, it “seemed clear that the president had not recognized Clooney” during their interaction. After the aide clarified that the person he was speaking to was Mr. Clooney, Mr. Biden said, “Oh, yeah! Hi George!”

“Clooney was shaken to his core. The president hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years,” the book states.

The Q&A segment at the Los Angeles event went viral at the time, as social media users shared a video that appeared to show President Obama guiding Mr. Biden off the stage after he seemed to freeze. The White House denounced the video as a “cheap fake,” but according to “Original Sin,” attendees of the event who posed for photos with Mr. Biden said he appeared “slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.”

The book also discusses Mr. Biden’s physical condition and says that in 2023 and 2024, his aides had private discussions about whether their boss would need to use a wheelchair if he won a second term.

Mr. Thompson reports in Axios that conversations he had for the book exposed the “White House’s determination to conceal the reality of Biden’s condition, at the risk of his own health.”

“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 excerpt states. 

The book also says that the 46th president’s aides thought it was “untenable” for him to use a wheelchair during the campaign. The White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, reportedly privately warned his aides that if the president had “another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery.”

The fears about Mr. Biden’s physical condition were exacerbated in 2023 when he tripped on a sandbag and fell on stage at the Air Force Academy. In light of those concerns, his aides reportedly plotted ways to have him walk shorter distances and changed the briefings he got before events to ensure he knew where to walk. 

According to Mr. Thompson, Mr. O’Connor “sometimes quipped that Biden’s staff members were trying to kill him, while he was trying to keep him alive” as he called for more rest time for the octogenarian president. 

The book also notes that Mr. Biden’s staff partly attributed his stiff gait to him fracturing his foot in November 2020. However, it points out that Mr. O’Connor had publicly stated that the fractures had been “completely healed.”

Around the same time the reported private discussions about whether the president would need a wheelchair took place, his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters in November 2023 that she would “put the president’s stamina, the president’s wisdom, ability to get this done on behalf of the American people, against anyone.” She had also previously insisted that she could not “keep up” with him. 

A spokesman for Mr. Biden told Mr. Thompson that there were “physical changes” as the president aged and that “evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity.” 

The spokesman also defended the reported efforts to conceal his condition, stating, “We are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.”

Another excerpt of “Original Sin,” obtained by the Guardian, quotes a senior aide to Mr. Biden — who reportedly quit due to their belief that he should not run again — as saying, “We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”

“I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him. Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again,” the aide said. 

However, Messrs. Thompson and Tapper report in their book that efforts to conceal Mr. Biden’s decline began even before 2023. The book states that in 2022, aides started filming videos with two cameras because they were concerned about his inability to deliver just a two-minute video address without a verbal stumble, and they believed that the two different cameras would make the editing less obvious. 

After the disastrous June 2024 debate, Senator Schumer reportedly met with Mr. Biden at his Rehoboth house and warned that if he lost the election to President Trump, a half-century of “amazing, beautiful work goes out the window.”

“But it’s worse than that – you will go down in American history as one of the darkest figures,” Mr. Schumer reportedly warned.

The book states that Mr. Biden told the then-Senate majority leader, “You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Original Sin” has been much anticipated in political circles as it has promised to pull back the curtains on what the authors call an “act of extended public deception that has few precedents” to cover up the president’s mental and physical conditions — which was speculated about by conservative media during his presidency but largely brushed off by mainstream outlets until his June debate. 

Ahead of the release of the book, Mr. Biden hired a veteran communications strategist to try to salvage his reputation.