Don’t Miss 2024’s Best Dark Comedy, "How to Elect a President with Dementia"

Directed by the same bottom feeders that previously brought you Hillary Clinton, who miraculously succeeded in losing to the same deeply unpopular buffoon Biden may be defeated by this November.

Screenshot of President Joe Biden during one of his better moment’s of last week’s debate with Donald Trump.

“Is Joe Biden Senile or Mentally Incapacitated?” ran the headline above an article I wrote in early May of 2021, four months after the country’s current president was inaugurated. The question was important “for obvious and sundry reasons,” one of the more evident being the US president is both head-of-state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and “was already being debated in Washington and across the country,” I noted in the first sentence of the story.

The same question was asked about Donald Trump when he held the White House, but while he “clearly had a personality disorder, was a textbook narcissist,” and often sounded barely coherent, all which posed problems of their own, he wasn’t senile, continued the story, which I posted at the pre-Substack version of Washington Babylon. That wasn’t as clear with Biden, even if the people most ardently promoting the idea that he was mentally incompetent were “pathological liars who can’t be trusted on anything,” such as Tucker Carlson and GOP shills. “Um, you know there’s a, uh, during World War II, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, that uh, you know, was totally different, than a, than the, he called it the, you know, the WWII, he had the War Production Board,” Biden said in a CNN interview that I pointed to, adding that it might not even be included in a Top Ten of his most bizarre public riffs.

Naturally, any claims about the president’s diminished mental capacity would be dismissed by most Democrats and the president’s army of media admirers as “partisan bullshit,” citing by way of example a recent Chicago Tribune column by Steve Chapman headlined, “An allegedly senile Joe Biden keeps succeeding,” which mocked Republicans who “persist in depicting him as a decrepit specimen who is wholly inadequate to his presidential responsibilities.” But my conclusion, which was based on interviews with Democrats as well as Republicans, was that Biden didn’t suffer from full-fledged dementia and could be sharp on good days, but he was “at minimum, in an advanced state of cognitive decline” that even the most positive observers agreed would “worsen during the rest of his term,” as would be expected given his age and the natural downward progression of dementia. While he might be technically able to run for reelection in 2024, he was unlikely to be well placed to do so as “he’d be 82 at the end of his first term,” and was already so “mentally frail” he had to be shielded from the media and wheeled out as little as possible for unscripted public appearances in order to mask his debility to the greatest extent possible.

So, how did I, a reporter with limited access to the type of inside sources that White House reporters at major outlets routinely talk to, know something other journalists weren’t aware of? The answer, of course, is that I didn’t. I was just among a minority of journalists who were willing to write about it or, as often happens, those with the best access were snowed by their sources, were reluctant to say Biden wasn’t all there mentally for fear they’d be cut off, or, especially more recently and whether consciously or subconsciously, rejected  writing about was easily discernible to the naked eye because the information was deemed to be damaging to the president’s reelection prospects and helpful to Trump’s, who’s widely reviled in Washington media circles. 

There are abundant reasons to dislike Trump – I do, too – but painting an overly rosy view of Biden’s mental health is the work of the Democratic Party and the president’s cynical handlers, not journalists. In the aftermath of disastrous debate performance by Biden last Thursday night, which starkly revealed his mental frailty to all but his most willfully blind backers, many journalists and even some Democratic operatives – such as Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting, who posted a tweet two hours after the debate ended that said, “Telling people they didn't see what they saw is not the way to respond to this.”

However, if Biden can’t be convinced to step aside, I suspect most of the newly skeptical, including Washington reporters,  will close ranks behind him again and try to convince voters they in fact didn’t see what they saw. Indeed, such an effort began while the debate was still underway, when NBC laughably “reported,” on the word of a campaign aide, Biden’s loopiness was due to a cold.

The attempt to salvage Biden’s candidacy has accelerated sharply ever since. No. 2 on my personal list of lame excuses tossed out by his flacks to explain the debate debacle was throwing unnamed staffers under the bus for allegedly doing a bad job preparing him to face Trump. “My only request was make sure he's rested before the debate, but he was exhausted,” a person who “appealed to Biden's top aides in the days before to no avail” told Reuters. "What a bad decision to send him out looking sick and exhausted.” 

At No. 1 was an alibi floated in a story by Alex Thompson of Axios, which asserted, based directly on anonymous presidential aides, that Biden was “dependably engaged” between 10 am and 4 pm, but was prone to “have verbal miscues and become fatigued” outside of that time range or when traveling. That the country’s leader was reliable for a full six hours a day was meant to be reassuring, though – and let’s put aside here that with the cat out of the bag, an enemy state could threaten to launch a nuclear strike on Washington outside of Biden’s brief daily window of lucidity – Thompson’s description was a nearly perfect definition of “sundowning,” a textbook sign of dementia, as summarized by the Mayo Clinic among many sources.   

The PR blitz, which included wheeling out Democratic luminaries like Bill and Hillary Clinton, the latter who somehow managed to turn the certain thrill of victory into the agony of defeat when she ran against Trump eight years ago, and Obama, the party’s go-to guy whenever it needs to shut down any whiff of populist ferment from the more left-leaning though virtually entirely neutered rank-and-file, caused some of those who expressed concern to walk back their post-debate remarks or cave entirely. Exhibit A in that regard was “Pod Save America” host Jon Favreau, who along with his podcast colleagues and fellow former Obama aides Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett went from savaging Biden’s debate performance, which Favreau called “fucking awful,” and all but calling for him to be immediately replaced as the Democratic nominee, to saying they’d prefer another candidate but would support the incumbent if that’s what the party decided.

The question of whether Biden has a few screws loose has been publicly raised since the 2020 campaign. On September 29 of that year, the day after the first Biden-Trump debate during their first race, PolitiFact, which on balance has always been transparently favorable to Democrats, published an item that labeled a claim that Biden was senile from Brit Hume of Fox News as flatly false, which was a strange thing to do given that he offered it as a personal opinion, not an established fact. In doing so, PolitiFact cited “geriatrics experts” who said Hume’s claim was wrong, which no doubt sounded quite definitive, but all it did was substitute their point of view for Hume’s. 

The opinion of the geriatric specialists no doubt sounded much more authoritative than Hume’s, who’s obviously biased in the opposite direction of PolitiFact, but as anyone who’s familiar with expert witnesses who are hired to testify in court knows, reputable sources experts can always be found to support any opinion on any occasion. Even now, after Biden’s diehard supporters were left shell shocked by his debate performance – at a debate party in Hollywood, Rob Reiner reportedly became so apoplectic he began screaming at the TV screen and Jane Fonda was reduced to tears – it would be simple to find “experts” who would unanimously diagnose Biden as completely senile or as sharp as a 21-year-old, depending on which of those positions the person who picked them wanted to hear. 

By 2022, questioning Biden’s mental well-being were more common as he was observed making more and more bizarre remarks even as his public appearances were increasingly limited to minimize the risks. “The difficulty of removing a president who suffers impairment makes it advisable to avoid octogenarians,” Chapman of the Chicago Tribune wrote in a column that July when he threw in the towel. “That’s why Biden would be doing us a favor to forgo a reelection bid and let other Democrats compete to replace him at the top of the ticket.”

But Biden’s inner circle had no trouble finding ways to dismiss such concerns, and continued to even as the problems became increasingly evident. In February of this year, the party faithful unleashed a blistering, coordinated attack on Special Counsel Robert Hur after he released his report that said Biden “willfully” retained classified material, but opted not to press charges on the grounds there wasn’t enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and that as a result of his mental frailty he 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.”

Nor was it difficult to find journalists to carry water for them by portraying Hur as a Republican partisan who was out to get Biden, or some other grounds that rendered his conclusions worthless. Graeme Wood, who more recently turned his attention to explaining to readers of The Atlantic why it’s “possible to kill children legally,” if they’re Palestinian children Israel kills anyway, wrote that despite anything Hur might think, neither Biden nor Trump “shows any sign of catastrophic senescence.” 

A story in the Financial Times on the Democratic counterattack on Hur cited Senator Chris Van Hollen (“I am absolutely confident...[Biden] is the right person to lead the country for another four years”); Vice President Harris (Hur’s comments about Biden’s memory were “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate”); and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (the report’s description of Biden “does not live in reality”). The story also sought the opinion of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who said, “The president is 81 years old. Is that meaningful? Of course not, it’s the same [as Trump]. They are older folks.” 

“My memory is fine,” Biden declared for his part “at a hastily arranged press conference,” said the story in the Financial Times, which in the newspaper’s defense clearly indicated it wasn’t at all sure of that. “Minutes later,” the story noted, Biden “referred to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the leader of Mexico” and not long before “confused François Mitterrand, the president of France who died in 1996, with the current president Emmanuel Macron,” and recounted a recent stimulating conversation with ex-German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, when the former chancellor he’d actually been talking to was Angela Merkel.

The Democratic Party’s generally successful efforts to portray Biden as perfectly fit to hold high office finally went up in smoke with his catastrophic debate showing. “How do you win an election when 72% of registered voters don't think you have the mental capacity to serve?” Sam Stein of Politico and MSNBC asked after a post-debate poll delivered that unhappy news. At the New Yorker, a bastion of liberal opinion, the magazine’s top editor David Reminick wrote, “For Joe Biden to insist on remaining the Democratic candidate would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment.”

Nonetheless, Biden, his family, and his inner circle continue to deride anyone, friend or foe, who raises such concerns. “A siege mentality has set in post-debate, one at odds with the persistent concerns of voters who view him as too old to be effective,” said a New York Times story published today. 

Screenshot of Jill Biden with her husband Joe Biden, president of his kindergarten class: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question, you knew all the facts."

The irony is that these are the very same people who will be responsible if Trump wins the November election – though they as always will hold themselves blameless and attribute Biden’s defeat, if that comes to pass, on “the left,” which they hate far more than Republicans – because it’s thanks to them that the Democrats have fielded the weakest possible candidate to run against him, with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, who lost to him in 2016 after the party’s ruling donor class forced the base to swallow her as the nominee. 

What’s even worse, though, is that the repellent Clinton-Obama-Biden wing of the party isn’t concerned in the slightest about trying to reelect a mentally infirm incumbent who would be 86 at the end of his second term and clearly in far worse shape than he is now, in the event he’s still alive. Instead, they insist voters ultimately don’t vote on the basis of debates and excitedly point to polls that show his support only dropped negligibly after his pathetic performance last Thursday. Needless to say, they  ignore the surveys that show otherwise, such as one conducted by Bill Clinton’s longtime pollster Stan Greenberg that said the share of Democratic voters who would cast their ballot for Biden declined from 65 percent before the debate to 54 percent when it ended.

Even if these political bottom feeders can staunch the current damage and were able to successfully drag Biden across the finish line in November, that wouldn’t justify stage managing a campaign to reelect a man who’s only “dependably engaged”  during a few daylight hours, and whose mental state is going to get worse with each passing day between now and January 2029 when, if he’s still among the living, his successor will be inaugurated. 

That’s especially so because there’s no way Biden is going to be any more effective in a second term as president – or more accurately an effective figurehead president run by the bottomfeeders that surround him – than he was in his first term. That’s precisely why Trump may win this year’s election in the first place, and similarly why France is teetering on the brink of fascism due to the failures of its neoliberal leader Emmanuel Macron, and also why if they pull off their great “victory,” if Biden were on hand to pass the torch at the 2029 inauguration, the person he’ll be passing it to would be a Republican who’s just as bad as Trump politically, but worse than him because they won’t be as blunderingly incompetent.

Biden and his inner circle claim he has to run because he’s the only Democrat who can defeat Trump, when in fact he’s one of the few candidates who could lose to him. If their primary concern was beating back Trumpism, Biden would step aside now, but their No. 1 priority is maintaining their political status and enhancing their future earnings potential by cashing in on their “public service.”

As far as my 2021 story about Biden goes, I admit I was wrong about one thing. “If I had to bet, he will not run for reelection,” I concluded. “If Biden is too far gone in 2024...his family will gently tell him it’s time to go home.”

I wrote that thinking it would be the only decent thing to do. I had no idea Jill Biden was such a fan of elder abuse that she’d continue to push her husband to run at this point due to excessive ambition, pride or whatever darkness led her to lead her husband onstage after the debate and congratulate him as you would a toddler, “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question, you knew all the facts."