The audio fed into ongoing Republican efforts to portray Biden as mentally unfit for the presidency at the end of his term and to allege that Democrats hid that fact from the public. “Coverup of the century,” Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles said in a social media post on X. “Reminder: this is the same guy who had the nuclear codes.”

Some have dismissed Axios' release of Biden's interview audio as a political "distraction" from controversies surrounding Trump's presidency.