George Stephanopoulos did the first interview with President Biden since the incumbent president’s disastrous and historic debate against Donald Trump. Biden’s attempt at projecting defiance — saying that only if the Lord Almighty came from heaven to ask him to stop running might he consider the possibility — came off as oblivious and unhinged. And that was before his claim to be presently “running the world,” which was delivered in the tone of a man asking permission only to continue pouring his own milk into his Grape-Nuts.
Stephanopoulos framed every single question about Biden’s fitness in terms of his odds of winning the upcoming election. For him as for much of the mainstream media, the purpose of every story and public utterance — as well of the internal censor acting in their minds — is the prevention of another Trump administration. Needless to say, it should also matter whether Biden is up to the job for another four years, or even up to the job now.
What we saw in the exchange between Stephanopoulos and Biden was effectively one co-conspirator turning on another after their scheme — in this case, hiding or looking past the president’s infirmities — was found out.
We’ve had ample warnings from some journalists dating back years that Biden wasn’t up for this for another four years. We saw the report from special counsel Robert Hur, which documented Biden’s mental lapses and decline. We saw with our own eyes Biden fumbling around during a press conference he held in response to that very report. Most conservatives have seen and passed around videos of the president looking physically and mentally lost during public engagements. Yes, some of these videos were deceptively edited, but many were not. In truth, the vast majority of Democrats must also have noticed, since before the debate more than two-thirds of them repeatedly told pollsters that Joe Biden was too old to be president.
Still, the White House staff, including senior aides to the president and vice president, members of the cabinet, and many senior figures in the mainstream media, including reporters at the New York Times, have been deceiving the public about the president’s condition — decrying the Hur report as character assassination and trying to debunk all the disturbing videos of the president as “disinformation” and “cheap fakes.” Their exertions, as well as the self-censorship of Democratic insiders and various journalists, meant that Biden’s decline took on the status of an “open secret” in Washington, D.C., even as the broader public realized what was happening.
The debate confirmed what most of the public suspected was true, and what foreign leaders knew well — Joe Biden is in steep decline. The seriousness of his impairment, the subsequent reporting about how tightly the circle has been drawn around him in the White House, and the quiet concern of allied governments implicate dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people in a kind of cover-up. These include members of the president’s family, high-level members of the White House staff, cabinet members, and the vice president, all of whom have continuously vouched for Biden’s sharpness. And, as accessories, they include members of the press who told the same false story. Come take your prizes, Paul Krugman, Joe Scarborough, New York Times reporters Katie Glueck and Tiffany Hsu, etc.
We still don’t have the ground truth about the president’s state. Just yesterday, the White House press secretary revealed that the president has a “verbal check-in” a couple times a week with a physician to monitor his health. This is only the latest in a series of contradictory, insufficient, and clouded revelations about the president’s medical condition and treatment.
What we know is that, while expounding on the importance of saving democracy and our norms, a host of Democratic players hid the president’s condition from the public for partisan reasons, and that they stopped not because they were conscience-stricken but because — thanks to the debate — they got caught.