The disaster debate has finally broken through the barriers of fact-checking that have served to conceal the president’s decline.
![U.S. President Joe Biden addresses supporters gathered on the tarmac after arriving at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in Morrisville, North Carolina, early on the morning of June 28, 2024.](https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2158959284.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&h=216&sig=URS-5iFsTIH8OAWn98nyng)
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It should not have been a surprise that President Joe Biden paused, wore blank looks and struggled to stay coherent during Thursday’s debate. If you knew anything about his behavior over the past few years, you would know his incompetence was normal. Someone runs the United States, and it’s not him.
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But Democrats were in shock. Panic began just minutes after the debate began, with party insiders bombarding Politico and CNN with angry messages. On Friday, contingency planning continued: Should Biden be asked to resign? Should Democrats go public with their concerns? (According to a New York Times opinion piece on Friday, the answer was yes.) With the party having to name a successor within a month, the questions are being asked desperately: Why did the debate need to be so galvanizing?
That may have something to do with Biden getting a generous defense from a friendly media outlet.
The gaffes have mostly happened in public. The teleprompter has proved an obstacle, with Biden caught reading stage directions aloud, first in 2022 (“End quote. Please repeat line.”) and again in April (“Pause.”); another in October (“Please clarify.”). It seems he can’t believe he’s done anything wrong, then; a far cry from a 2016 teleprompter stumble that invited self-aware jokes.
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The physical stumbles have also piled up: Biden’s stumbles and falls at a graduation ceremony and on the stairs of Air Force One signaled a lack of basic physical skills and awareness of his surroundings.
Biden sometimes freezes altogether, requiring younger leaders like his wife (at Thursday’s debate) or former President Barack Obama (at a recent fundraiser) to carefully step off the stage. Each “freezing” action prompts news articles to explain the behavior. “Fact: Biden paused amid cheers and applause as he walked off stage,” an Associated Press fact check said. Indeed, in the same way that a baby pauses when presented with bright colors.
A video of Biden at the G7 summit in Italy in mid-June also drew criticism. It showed Biden distractedly walking away from the other leaders to stare at nearby parachutists, before Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni bursts in and turns him back toward the camera. Some viewers saw this as a sign of absent-minded old age. A Reuters fact check argued that the video “lacked context.”
Then there are cue cards. Not for speeches, but for events. One such card presented in 2022 carefully explained how the interaction should proceed: “You enter and greet participants. You take your seat. Journalists enter. You make brief comments (2 minutes). Journalists exit…” Business Insider responded with a defensive report that dismissed the memo as business as usual and blamed the concerns on the far right.
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But by 2024, Democratic donors were concerned about Biden’s overreliance on memos and pre-planned communications that are part of his private fundraising practices, Axios reported.
Donors aren’t the only ones concerned. In February, a prosecutor tasked with deciding whether to indict the president for taking classified documents after he left office in 2017 recommended not to go ahead with the case, citing Biden’s mental health. In a 2023 interview, Biden revealed that he had a “severely limited” memory and was unable to recall key moments, including his term as vice president and the date of his son’s death.
“At trial, Mr. Biden will likely present to the jury the same way he did during our cross-examination: a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a limited memory,” the prosecutors’ report said.
“It would be difficult to persuade a jury that a former president who was already in his 80s should be convicted of a felony that requires a deliberate mental condition.”
Finally, nonsense stories. Examples abound, but the ones that grab attention get a fair amount of suppression from their media allies. Last June, Biden said at a press conference that he had “eradicated cancer as we know it.” He was talking about a hypothetical cure for cancer that he hoped to bring to fruition, but somewhere along the way, the hypothetical aspect was dropped. Critics jumped on this, and defenders, such as Reuters’ fact-checking division, argued that there had been no claim that cancer was cured.
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Last September, he gave a disastrous Vietnam press conference, during which he suddenly said, “I don’t know what you guys think, but I’m going to bed now,” before being interrupted by a staff member a minute later. CNN mentioned it in a story about the event, but buried it in a way that de-emphasized the disaster. Things haven’t gotten better since. On Thursday, he claimed, “We finally won Medicare.”
That probably came as no surprise to some, as anxiety had been building even before the debate: In early June, The Wall Street Journal reported that during a closed-door congressional meeting, Biden “read from notes to make the obvious point, then paused for long periods, sometimes closing his eyes for so long that some in the room suspected he wasn’t listening.”
Still, ahead of the debate, CNN, as always, tried to defend the ailing president, with analyst Oliver Darcy mocking conservative criticism of Biden’s mental health for indulging in conspiracy theories and taking video clips out of context.
“For years, and especially in recent months, the MAGA media has portrayed Biden as a demented, mentally disabled old man who can’t even remember what he had for breakfast, much less run the federal government,” he wrote. “That may sound like an exaggeration to those who don’t listen to Fox News or talk radio, but in the world of right-wing media, it’s a real and consistent theme.”
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It is clear to anyone listening to the president’s direct footage that he has not taken it seriously while in office, especially in the past year. Polling data backs this up: Americans agree that Biden is too old to run for president again after 2023. But it took a presidential debate for full-blown rumors of a coup to circulate, perhaps due to blind belief in reports from friendly sources or sheer delusion. In the end, it seems the Democrats were fooled by fake news.
National Post
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