On the menu today: Now it can be told that plenty of people close to President Joe Biden have seen “a marked incidence of cognitive decline” in the past six months, that “an awful lot of major Democrats” have seen it but have publicly insisted that Biden is fine, and that Biden’s senior officials “curate the information being presented [to Biden] in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.” Last week, I wrote that Joe Biden is overdue to move to a retirement home. Now we learn that the White House is effectively operating like a retirement home — “Don’t tell Grandpa the bad news, it will only get him agitated.” It is more than fair to ask who’s really running the country if Biden has become so mentally, emotionally, and physically fragile that he can’t handle being told bad news. And yet for Democrats, the objective between now and Election Day is to figure out how to get you to forget what you’ve seen and heard over the past four days or so.
Carl Bernstein: Biden Friends See ‘a Marked Incidence of Cognitive Decline’
Saving it for the book, huh, Bernstein?
Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, to CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night, describing what he has heard from his sources close to President Biden:
These are people, several of them, who are very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported and been among — among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him. And they are adamant that what we saw the other night . . . 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.
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 have witnessed some of them. But here we see tonight, as these people say, President Biden at his absolute best and yet these people who have supported him, loved him, campaigned for him, see him often say that in the last six months, particularly, there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical [decline]. . . .
The debate prep was supervised by Ron Klain, who has been with President Biden for many years. And people I’ve talked to have all been to Ron Klain in the last year to say, “We have a problem.” We have a problem such as we saw the other night, that there have been numerous instances where the president has lost his train of thought, can’t pick it up again. There was a fundraiser which 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. This was allegedly in June of ’20. This was June of, this was a year ago, almost exactly at the old Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue. And he became very stiff, and a chair had to be brought for him to do the latter part of the event.
I think that what these folks are saying and have been saying for a while is, yes, he’s great, when we see him as we have tonight. But he also has these inexplicable moments that we are very concerned about. And you, Ron Klain and the first family, we need to talk about this. And they’ve been pushed back repeatedly whenever it’s been brought up. . . .
It really needs to be explored according to the people I’m talking to. And I think an awful lot of major Democrats believe this, including some who have made statements to the contrary. But this is a problem that’s not going to go away unless it’s explicable. Does this mean doctors’ reports? I mean, [it would] obviously be great if we could have real doctors’ reports from both candidates.
Looking back at this 2022 post, I can say that the only thing I got wrong was which famous Watergate reporter was going to tell us about a White House effort to hide the president’s health condition from the public.
The message from elected Democrats, en masse, is that Joe Biden is usually “sharp as a tack” and just had a bad night because of a cold. (Apparently this debilitating, performance-ruining cold didn’t stop Biden from walking through a crowded Waffle House and shaking hands with everyone immediately after.)
If it was just one bad night, why has the president not done a single interview with anyone since the debate ended at 10:30 p.m. Eastern last Thursday? Yes, Biden has read off a teleprompter at a rally in Raleigh, N.C., attended a fundraiser in the Hamptons, met with his family for a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz at Camp David, and read a brief four-minute statement off a teleprompter and took no questions last night.
Then there’s this shocking — nay, terrifying — report from four reporters at Politico:
During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.
“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***less of him.”
The official said, “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.”
What the hell are these people talking about? You can’t tell the president bad news because he won’t be pleasant to be around?
I’m sorry, is anyone under the impression that the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) is chock-full of good news every morning? Guess what, the best and most current assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, tracking what’s going on regarding China, Russia, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, ISIS, and the rest of the world, is going to have bad news in it. Some mornings, it’s going to have a lot of bad news in it. But the president needs to know that stuff — and remember that stuff! — to make the best decisions he can.
Don’t tell me this guy should be president if he can’t handle receiving bad news! That’s the job!
Last Thursday night, our long-held suspicion that the president was senile or cognitively impaired was confirmed. The goal for Democrats, between now and Election Day, is to get you and everyone you know to somehow forget that. There are plenty of other legitimate things to worry about — see the list of threats in the PDB above — but the existence of other problems does not diminish the problem of a cognitively impaired president, much less make it go away.
Starting midday Monday, one of the efforts to distract you was, “Aren’t you outraged by this Supreme Court decision?” If you want the straight story on that, check out my colleagues Andy McCarthy, Dan McLaughlin, and Charlie Cooke. I’m no lawyer, but the president being legally immune from criminal prosecution for official acts but not for private acts seems like the right distinction. For example, I think President Obama’s decision to drone-strike American-born Yemeni jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki was completely justified and legal — even if it did get into a murky area of the U.S. government’s executing an American citizen without a trial. If Congress believed Obama’s action was not legal, it had the option of impeaching him. But no one in the U.S. would have the authority to charge Obama with murder.
In the coming days and weeks, we will get, “Aren’t you outraged by what Donald Trump just said?” “Aren’t you outraged by Donald Trump’s selected running mate?” “Aren’t you outraged by what this GOP senator or representative said?”
And who knows? Maybe some of those things will deserve some outrage.
But none of that will change the fact that we have a commander in chief whose closest friends and allies believe he is cognitively impaired, and whose staff is afraid to tell him bad news.
ADDENDUM: After Bernstein made his report on CNN last night, the network brought in Ashley Etienne, a former Biden and Kamala Harris adviser, for reaction. Her assessment:
You know, he still looks strong, and with it, even on those teleprompters. And, you know, there are times in which many elected officials, even former President Trump, has not looked strong on a teleprompter. But here’s the thing that I think that is that’s being lost. And I’d like to go back to what Axe [David Axelrod] said, and that is Trump also reinforced the negatives about him. You know, he had none of the challenges that Joe Biden did, but still also underperformed. He, you know, he didn’t raise nearly as much money, $6 million short of what Joe Biden raised during the actual debate. Joe Biden’s raised $33 million since that point.
That’s the spin. Yes, the president may be obviously cognitively impaired, but he raised a lot of money.