RUTHFULLY YOURS

Who is currently in charge in America? It’s sobering to realise that this critical question was never asked in this week’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. After all, what question could be more important than who is running the country?

The nominal answer should be vice-president Harris’s boss, President Joe Biden. However, the Democratic Party powers-that-be have staged something of a palace coup, deeming Biden insufficiently compos mentis to be the party candidate in November’s election. At the same time, there is an unwillingness to address whether he is capable of leading the US right now.

When seen on the day after the Trump-Harris debate, Biden was wearing a Trump 2024 hat during a visit to a fire station in Pennsylvania to mark the anniversary of 9/11. Perhaps he was demonstrating a sense of humour or a nod to bipartisanship. Or quite possibly, this was another King-Lear-losing-his-faculties moment.

Over the past year, Biden’s cognitive decline has been apparent to most observers, even as it remained unmentioned by his supporters and the press – until the disastrous June debate with Trump. In February, the New York Times published a piece by a neuroscientist that assured us that ‘we’re thinking about Biden’s memory and age in the wrong way’. The message this tried to send was: ‘Don’t worry, it happens to everybody as they get older.’ Except, of course, this particular elderly man is in charge of the nuclear codes.

The evidence of Biden’s mental decline continues to mount up. Earlier this year, a special counsel found that he had retained classified government documents when he left the vice-presidency in 2017. But whereas Trump himself was charged with multiple felony accounts after he had done something similar – retaining dozens of classified files after he left office – Biden was exonerated in his particular documents case. This was because, as the special counsel noted in his report, ‘Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’. Ah, the rarely used ‘foolish, fond old man’ defence.

After the special counsel report came out, Biden held a press conference to dispute the findings of his mental infirmity. During the press conference, he mixed up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. This was not exactly a reassuring moment or a ringing endorsement of his mental acuity.

The political establishment has gone to extraordinary efforts to protect Biden. Attorney general Merrick Garland has refused to release the tapes of the special-counsel interview with Biden, which would reveal more about his condition to the public. Those with a sense of irony and a sense of history, will appreciate the Justice Department’s insistence that transcripts are sufficient and the actual tapes should not be released. This is the same Justice Department that spurned Richard Nixon’s offer to supply only transcripts rather than release White House tapes during the Watergate affair, a demand that played a large part in Nixon’s resignation from office.

President Biden’s personal physician, Kevin O’Connor, has done the public no favours with his handling of the president’s condition. In a six-page medical report on Biden’s health released in February, there is no indication cognitive testing was performed. This would normally be part of any detailed neurologic exam in an elderly person, especially in someone with a history of brain aneurysm and Covid infection like Biden. Dr Lawrence Mohr, White House physician to two presidents, said that, based on what he has seen publicly, ‘I don’t think there’s any question that the president should undergo a test of cognitive function, and he should do it very quickly’.

Biden’s physician has been reluctant to discuss the president’s health in a public forum. As a result, the president’s health, and especially his ongoing mental status, has been something of a public mystery.

The world is in a parlous state, from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to the brewing conflict between China and Taiwan. Yet an obviously debilitated Joe Biden will be the commander-in-chief of the United States for nearly four more months until a new president is inaugurated in January 2025. Given what we know – and what we don’t know – about Biden’s mental capacity, how can anyone be confident at this point that America’s immediate future is in capable hands?

Cory Franklin’s new book, The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.