A Disinformation Campaign for the Ages

J ust two weeks before Donald Trump got shot, and three weeks before Uncle Joe Biden bowed out of the 2024 race entirely, the president of the United States revealed himself to be something approaching senile.

During a prime-time, nationally televised debate with Trump, Biden — among other things — bragged to his opponent that he and the Democrats had “finally beat[en] Medicare,” argued that the USA is home to “one thousand trillionaires” (no earthly trillionaires currently exist; the world’s richest man is worth $218 billion), and unconvincingly compared his golf game to Trump’s for an awkward period of minutes.

At one point, Trump summed up an attempted Biden riposte by saying: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows, either.” Even center-left CNN, a platform that referred to Trump as “the convicted felon,” had to concede that “objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960.” Oof. Biden’s age was the clear and accepted reason for his defeat: “As a matter of humanity, [seeing] the personification of the ravages of age that await everybody was painful.”

All of this is notable because virtually the entire mainstream media has spent the past few years denying that age has taken any serious toll on Biden — even as we are getting a slew of new published reports about how those in the now-lame-duck president’s orbit had concerns about his condition well before the debate. Several years back, PolitiFact actually provided a formal fact-check of Fox News pundit Brit Hume’s claim that the former Obama veep was “senile.” The platform went so far as to interview a friendly geriatric-medicine specialist, and rated Hume’s argument as flatly “false,” not far from “pants on fire.”

The fact-checkers hardly stood alone. One of the on-air hosts of MSNBC’s popular Morning Joe program recently described the octogenarian as “sharp as a tack” and “the best Biden ever.” One quarter-step down from the elite national press, my hometown Chicago Tribune could not resist doing a bit of the same, running a locally debated op-ed headlined “An Allegedly Senile Biden Keeps Succeeding”! A common claim during all of this hagiography was that the president’s only actual impediment was a stammer — a slight stutter that cruel Republicans were exaggerating into a problem.

Of course, this was all BS — something that was almost universally known or suspected among smart citizens on the right and in the center. Anyone who’s watched one of literally dozens of video montages such as the Economic Times’ “Compiled – Glimpses of Joe Biden’s Gaffes” has seen scores of major presidential lapses, often reminiscent of the worst moments of beloved seniors in our own lives. These include Biden simply ambling past foreign leaders or other dignitaries rather than shaking hands, announcing proudly that he had cancer after a (presumed) teleprompter flub, and confusing Syria with Libya and Mexico with Egypt. Fighting well with a weak hand, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre famously insisted that most or all such videos were “cheap-fakes” generated by artificial-intelligence programs. But they clearly were not: We all just saw that.

At almost the same time as the “strapping Biden the satyr” nonsense, we have been exposed almost daily to a different fairy tale about his primary political opponent, Big Naranja, Donald Trump. Per this one, Trump is a right-of-Subotai monarchist who openly plans to return the U.S.A. to the High Middle Ages. The generally serious New Republic just ran a print cover showing the big guy face-morphing into Adolf Hitler, complete with a crew cut and a mustache-shaped shadow just under his nose. Major publications and recent Joe Biden advertisements insist that Trump has declared that he plans to be “a dictator from Day One,” has said there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses the 2024 election, and has even called for the deaths of specific black American citizens.

Of course, this is rank nonsense, too. The “dictator” comment was an obvious joke about tough executive orders regulating immigration on Trump’s first day back in office as president. The “bloodbath” term referred to the strictly economic hit that U.S. automobile manufacturing is likely to take following a GOP loss. The “Black Americans” Trump spoke of were not random citizens “of color” but rather the Central Park Five, who were famously accused of raping a jogger in downtown Manhattan (and eventually had their convictions vacated despite lingering questions about the case). Trump wanted them duly executed only if and after a jury found them guilty of that crime.

Who could believe any of this media nonsense? Could anyone? When Biden talks about turning the temperature down in response to the attempt on Trump’s life, this type of coverage should be top of mind.

For the reality is that the American apparatus of discourse has become almost worthless, frequently producing widely repeated stories that are almost the opposite of the truth. My very first article for National Review, for example, dealt with the so called “Twitter Files” — Elon Musk’s public revelations, when the South African businessman took control of the social-media platform, that a whole series of matrix-style technologies were being employed to monitor and control the speech of very major conservative outlets on the platform. Many more mainstream outlets are worse than Twitter/X proved to be, with some appearing to have undergone almost total “institutional capture.”

Thankfully, while the radical base of the Democratic Party might eat up hyperbolic lies, normal citizens tend to recognize them as nonsense: Trust in the national media is at a historic low.