RUTHFULLY YOURS

When did you first figure out that something was wrong with Joe Biden — seriously wrong, not just in the “bit older, bit slower” way, but in that genuine “oh man, this guy ain’t gonna make it” way? I know many of our readers will be eager to claim the earliest date possible, because we’ve all heartily loathed the man as president for four years, and I doubt any of us liked his vice presidency either. (A tip of the cap to any keen-memoried old-timer who nominates 1987 as the year when Joe Biden actually first truly “lost it.”)

For my part, it came as an instantaneous, shuddering revelation when I saw him address the nation on August 16, 2021, as he inattentively slurred through his eagerly awaited Afghanistan withdrawal speech. I’ve already told this story once — in one of the most alarmingly Cassandra-like pieces I will ever write, one I specifically recall being laughed off by many of my more left-leaning acquaintances as “right-wing fever-swamp nonsense.” Permit me an excerpt:

Instead it was Biden’s demeanor that shocked me: slurred words, a sleepy and distracted tone suggesting periodic loss of mental focus, and his visibly withered face and slump-shouldered bearing. The whole time, I was cringing with an embarrassed empathy that comes not from politics but rather from that human reserve of mercy and shame we all share. He’d already looked slow and out of it during the (abbreviated) 2020 campaign, but his rapid slide since only a year before jarred me. It was ugly and unfortunate to see him looking lost and frail during the speech — the ricketiness of our president revealed to the world, sacrificing not only his own dignity but our national dignity as well. I wanted to turn away, to turn it off. It hurt to watch. It was at that moment that I concluded Joe Biden wasn’t going to be his party’s nominee for president in 2024.

Keep in mind, I wrote the above piece on June 18, 2024 — a week before the presidential debate that ended Biden’s career and a full month before it technically became official. (I’m no psychic; the professional term of art for what I did there is called “great timing.”) But the point is that I knew he was falling apart long ago. You readers probably knew he was falling apart long ago. Jim Geraghty has been pounding the drum about this literally since that fateful day in August of 2021.

Joe Biden’s mental decline was no secret to conservatives for the simple reason that each of us has eyes and the ability to use them to assess Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline. You could condescend to us and insult our intelligence all you wanted, jabber about “cheap fakes” and call us crazy — it didn’t matter. We knew what it was that we saw with Biden, and weren’t going to be gaslighted. We were right because of course we were. It was blazingly obvious.

So what the hell happened to the mainstream media during this entire period? Where were our sentinels of the republic, those tribunes of truth? How can the Fourth Estate, with its eyes forever upon the world of Washington politics, have missed Biden’s advancing mental and physical decrepitude? Why did so many journalists claim they weren’t even suspicious after it all came crashing down in late June?

I have an appealingly simple theory to explain this mystery: They didn’t miss this at all. Everyone knew, and the sorts of people who would have normally pursued these whispers about Biden’s remoteness — obvious enough from his calendar and the behavior of his public minders — simply decided not to because it was not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to do so, at least as perceived by the “herd mind” of the media, the left-tinged blob of assignment editors, investigative reporters, and liberal commentators across Washington.

Do you know how I know this? I know this because back in 2019, when Joe Biden seemed for all the world like a hopelessly boring retread with no chance of winning the 2020 nomination — when Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders were thought to be the main competitors for the Democratic prize — the New York Times was more than happy to report about Biden’s age. Once he captured the nomination and went into a quasi-hibernative “basement campaign” (timed perfectly to conceal his weakening state), however, that was it for any investigations into that topic.

I know this because in the fall of 2022, during that brief window when it looked like Biden might decide to pass the torch instead of running again, the window to discuss Biden’s age was once again open for the Washington Post: “Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection.” Once Biden chose to run for a second term — a moment of world-historical hubris — the subject went back into storage, verboten in polite commentary of real reporting.

I know this because the pressure to not venture the topic was immense, and I saw it come from within the media, not just from the Biden administration. In February of this year Ezra Klein published a piece in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop his reelection bid. Klein pointed not just to his unpopularity but to his obvious decay as well. It was a daring thing for a mainstream liberal columnist to write, and Klein predictably paid the price for his daring, being pilloried up and down the halls of media commentary by the Left so relentlessly that he was forced to write a traumatized apology after Biden’s hectoring State of the Union address a month later, saying, “I’m sorry; he should stay in the race.” Now, of course, he says he never really changed his opinion. He should have stuck to his guns so we wouldn’t have to wonder.

The media want to tell us that they didn’t know? If they didn’t know, then why were they so eager to raise the subject when it seemed possible to prevent Joe Biden from winning the nomination, or discourage him from running again, but curiously not afterward? Why then such servile eagerness to act as Karine Jean-Pierre’s water boys near the end of the entire debacle, when the Biden administration was desperately selling the “cheap fakes” PR push in between trying to hand-wave away Hollywood fundraiser gaffes? (The term “cheap fakes” was coined by the media, not by Jean-Pierre.) In fact, what better proof do we need of the media’s purely instrumental interest in Biden’s mental disintegration than the fact that once it became impossible to conceal after the debate, they flooded the zone with coverage to push Biden out of the race, but once he was gone promptly never discussed him again? (This led me to point out in frustration several times during the campaign that a mental invalid was still president of the United States.)

Let us take the media professionals at their word, that they really had no idea things were this bad with Joe Biden until the sudden meltdown of the debate. Let us take them at their word that the revelations of the Wall Street Journal‘s piece about his concealed collapse took them by complete surprise. If that is the case, I end with a sincere question: Of what value are these people, then? If the media professionals really didn’t know — when I could tell, when you could tell, when it was a key concern among voters — if every media organ was so flat-footed, incurious, or flummoxed by White House smoke and mirrors that none of them ever thought to seriously investigate whether the president of the United States might secretly be in the midst of massive mental collapse, then why should we respect them? What would we say it is they do here? What are they bringing to the table when they are missing the biggest story of the last four years, one hiding in plain sight?

If the media chose not to explore Biden’s mental decline because of partisan allegiance to the Democrats or dislike of Trump, then they have forfeited their credibility in a devastatingly permanent way. In that case, they would have willingly participated in what I consider to be the single worst scandal in presidential history: a mentally incapacitated president concealed from the public and controlled by his advisers. If they have not done this — if they truly were taken by surprise — then we are in little better a position: We are cursed with the most useless media class in the world, a mass of despairingly hopeless incompetents who failed in the most important duty they were ever asked to perform in their jobs.

I’m not sure which verdict they would prefer.