Democrats fooled by their own fake news of Biden’s mental fitness

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There should have been nothing surprising about President Joe Biden’s babbling trail-offs, his vacant stare and his struggle to maintain coherence at Thursday’s debate. If you’ve been remotely aware of how the man has behaved in the past couple of years, you would know his incapacitated state is par for the course. Someone is running the United States, but it’s not him.

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Democrats, however, were shocked. The freakout began only minutes into the debate, as party sources texted their exasperation to Politico and CNN. It continued Friday with the mulling-over of contingency plans. Should Biden be asked to step down? Should Democrats go public with their concerns? (Based on Friday’s New York Times opinion section, the answer to this was “yes.”) The questions are being asked frantically, as the party has one month to put forward a replacement. How could it be that it took a debate to spur them so?

It might have to do with the generous defence Biden’s been provided in friendly media.

The gaffes have largely transpired in public. The teleprompter has proven to be a hurdle, with Biden being caught reading stage directions out loud: first in 2022 (“End of quote. Repeat the line.”) and again in April (“Pause”). Another possible cue read-out happened in October (“Make it clear.”) When it happens, he seems unable to see that he did anything wrong. Compare it to one of his teleprompter stumbles in 2016, which elicited a self-aware joke, and it’s night and day.

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The physical stumbles have added up too. Biden’s trips and falls — at a graduation ceremony, on stairs of Air Force One — indicate a decline in motility and a lack of awareness of basic surroundings.

Sometimes, Biden doesn’t move at all, requiring the need to be carefully guided offstage by younger handlers like his wife (at Thursday’s debate) and former president Barak Obama (at a recent fundraiser). Each “freeze” typically inspires news stories to explain away the behaviour. “THE FACTS: Biden paused amid cheers and applause as he exited the stage,” went the Associated Press fact check. Sure, in the same way a baby pauses when it’s shown a bright colour.

A mid-June video of Biden at the G7 Summit in Italy was also circled by the wagons. The clip showed Biden distractedly wandering off from his fellow leaders to gawk at a nearby paratrooper, only for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to swoop in and redirect him toward the cameras. Some viewers took this to be a sign of absent-minded senility; a Reuters “fact check” insisted the video was “missing context.”

Then, there are the cue cards — not for speeches, but for events. One such card was flashed in 2022, which carefully laid out how to proceed through interactions: “YOU enter … and say hello to participants. YOU take YOUR seat. Press enters. YOU give brief comments (2 minutes). Press departs….” Business Insider responded with a defensive report that dismissed the notes as regular business and attributed any concern to the far right.

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But by 2024, Axios reported that Democratic donors were worried about the over-reliance on notes and pre-planned interactions, which were part of Biden’s closed-door fundraiser routine.

Donors aren’t the only ones who are concerned. In February a prosecutor tasked with deciding whether to charge the president for taking classified documents after leaving office in 2017, recommended against proceeding with charges — in part because of Biden’s mental state. Interviews conducted in 2023 revealed a “severely limited” memory, and an inability to recall significant moments in time, such as his term as vice-president and the date of his son’s death.

“At trial, 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,” reads the prosecutor’s report.

“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Finally, the nonsense. There are many examples, but the ones that receive high-profile attention also earn a generous share of suppressing fire from media allies. Last June, Biden stated in a news conference that “We ended cancer as we know it.” He had been discussing a hypothetical cure to cancer that he aspired to bring about, but midway through, the hypothetical aspect was dropped. Critics jumped on this, and defenders, like Reuters’ fact-checking department, insisted that no cancer cure claims were made.

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Last September, he gave a disastrous news conference in Vietnam, during which he uttered an unprompted “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed” — only to be cut off a minute later by his staff. CNN did mention this in its write-up of the event, but it was buried, de-emphasizing the utter disaster. There’s been no improvement since. On Thursday, he claimed, “We finally beat Medicare.”

An anxious rumble has been growing since prior to the debate, so it couldn’t have been a surprise for some. At the beginning of June, the Wall Street Journal recounted a behind-closed-doors congressional meeting during which Biden “read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.”

Still, prior to the debate, CNN attempted to run cover as usual for the ailing president. Analyst Oliver Darcy ridiculed conservative criticism of Biden’s mental state for engaging in conspiracy theories and taking video clips out of context.

“For years, and particularly over the last few months, MAGA Media has portrayed Biden as a senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government,” he wrote. “That might sound like an exaggeration to those who don’t tune in to Fox News or listen to talk radio, but it has been a real and constant theme in the right-wing media universe.”

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It’s been quite evident to anyone who listens to direct footage of the president that he hasn’t been all there during his tenure, and it’s been especially pronounced in the past year. Public opinion data supports this: since 2023, the people of the United States have been unified in their belief that Biden is too old to run for president again. Yet, perhaps because of a blind belief in friendly-sourced news coverage, perhaps because of sheer delusion, it took a presidential debate to prompt serious rumblings of a coup. Looks like fake news got the Democrats in the end.

National Post

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