A senior Biden administration official reportedly said this week that the president is “not a pleasant person to be around” at work and that people are genuinely terrified of him.

The remarks come as President Joe Biden has faced widespread calls to step down following his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump last week.

The senior official told POLITICO that Biden’s staff has to withhold briefing him on specific matters likely to cause him to erupt in anger.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s**tless of him.”

“He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it,” the person added.

The report said that those who are shielding Biden from having the “tough conversations” that need to occur include first lady Jill Biden and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens.

The report comes after veteran investigative journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN on Monday that sources told him Biden’s debate performance on Thursday was part of an ongoing pattern of the president showing signs of cognitive decline.

“They are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off, that there have been 15-20 occasions in the last year and a half, when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” Bernstein said. “And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who, who have witnessed some of them.”

He said that the people he spoke to have worked very closely with Biden for many years and that they “say that in the last six months particularly, there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.”

One specific example he mentioned happened last year at a Four Seasons hotel where Biden spoke at a fundraiser.

“He started at the podium and then he became very stiff, according to the people there as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis,” he said. “And he became very stiff and a chair had to be brought for him to do the latter part of the event.”

At the end of the segment, Bernstein seemed to imply that the White House’s physician report on Biden’s health was dishonest and that information was being concealed.

“I mean, obviously, it’d be great if we could have real doctor’s reports from both candidates,” he said. “Well, that’s not gonna happen.”