CNN has a story up today which summarizes some of the contents of the newly released book by Tapper and Thompson. You’ve probably heard some of it before but it really is striking seeing all of it in one place. There was just so much evidence that Biden wasn’t fit for office, much less re-election.
The book details episode after episode where Democratic lawmakers, White House aides, members of Biden’s Cabinet and Democratic donors were shocked at Biden’s diminishing mental and physical capabilities while the president embarked on an ill-fated 2024 reelection bid. But nearly all did not speak out publicly or try to stop him from running.
“What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired,” Tapper and Thompson write. “It was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”…
Tapper and Thompson found that concerns about Biden’s health issues dated back to his 2020 campaign. Biden shot campaign videos talking to voters on Zoom ahead of the convention but the hours of footage were largely unusable and stunned some on Biden’s team.
“It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving,” said one Democrat, according to the book. “I didn’t think he could be president.”
Again, that was in 2020, before four years of the most stressful job in the world. The decision to lie and cover up Biden’s condition grew organically alongside his inability to do the job. The more help he needed, the more help he got, but always without any acknowledgement of what was happening.
Tapper and Thompson chronicle many ways in which the Biden campaign and the White House masked the president’s condition, even as the signs were becoming clearer. These are some of the most compelling portions of their story, showing how efforts at concealment are not necessarily planned out; sometimes they just happen. For example, White House speechwriters began to simplify the texts they prepared for the president. “Everything got shorter: speeches, paragraphs, even sentences,” Tapper and Thompson report. “The vocabulary shrank.” This was not some mandate from on high; the speechwriters “were also slowly adapting to Biden’s diminished capabilities.”
Biden began relying more on teleprompters and note cards even for simple gatherings. Members of his cabinet recall meetings that were “terrible” and “uncomfortable” and “so scripted,” even early in his term. “It was like talking to your grandpa,” said a former leader of a European country who saw Biden in 2021.
By 2024 the habit to conceal the truth was so strong that Biden’s top advisers couldn’t let it go. Even after the disastrous presidential debate when it became undeniable to the entire country, Biden’s “Politburo” wanted to ride it out and just keep lying.
One campaign adviser recounted a post-debate discussion with Biden aboard Air Force One. “What are we doing here? the adviser thought as the president spoke. This guy can’t form a f**king sentence,” according to the book. “If I had a conversation like this with someone who wasn’t the president, I would be worried about his health. And here he is, the sitting president of the United States.”
Their public credibility may have collapsed but the Biggest Lie never ended. Indeed, the people closest to Biden and Biden himself are still lying about it now.
Biden and his wife defended his performance as president in a joint interview on ABC’s “The View” earlier this month, pushing back on suggestions he experienced cognitive decline in his final year in office.
“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” Jill Biden said.
All of this bad behavior from people in power was premised on the idea that Donald Trump was so awful anything could be excused in the name of stopping him. So lying constantly about Biden’s condition was okay because only he could defeat Trump. Lying to journalists and threatening to ruin their reputations was okay because only Biden could save the country from Trump.
Just as the Biggest Lie never really ended, the reasoning that prompted it hasn’t ended either. You can see this in the comments responding to this story about Biden’s decline at the NY Times. What I see are a lot of Democrats who are more than ready to move on from this topic. After all, why does it matter that the people around the president hid his decline from the public for at least his entire presidency and tried to push him into office for another four years? The only thing that matters, as always, is Trump.
This is the top comment:
Why is the mainstream media obsessed with former President Biden’s mental health in office—a mental state that obviously resulted in his administration accomplishing a great deal of important and worthy policy making?
This is news that virtually all Americans were well aware of by late June 2024.
I could almost understand such an obsession if the news cycle had somehow slowed way down and the current administration was humming along nicely serving the citizen’s interests and ensuring America’s founding principles were being honored at home and abroad.
But this is decidedly not the case as Mr. Trump and his colleagues batter the foundations of our democracy, upend our nation’s historic role in the international system, create and maintain ongoing economic and financial volatility, and openly and personally enrich themselves at the national trough that is the government as they see it.
So, for mainstream media to exercise so little responsibility for the welfare of the nation—now and going forward—by forgoing attention, column inches, and airtime focused on what matters now in order to rehash news stories from 11 months is a BIG story in itself. One historians will analyze—if the country survives—for years to come, as they write of the media’s role in normalizing Mr. Trump, vilifying Mr. Biden, and facilitating the country’s destruction.
For this person, any talk about Biden is old news and insignificant. No reckoning with the years of lies is necessary. Just move on.org and get back to bashing Trump already. Isn’t that what the media is supposed to be doing?
This will quickly become old news and won’t matter much by the next election. Meanwhile we have a crisis of leadership and governing right now, delivered to us by the Republican Party.
The lies of the Democrats don’t matter and never will matter. The same people who branded Trump’s response to the 2020 election “the Big Lie” and made Jan. 6 a story that was the focus of their concerns for at least a year, are ready to move on from the Biggest Lie immediately. Sure Biden was probably not competent to run the country and Democrats were all lying in unison about it but why is the media beating a dead horse?
This is all very interesting and probably not news to any informed reader, but I am sick of all the recrimination, re-visiting of what went wrong, etc. in the press. It is way past time to move on and work on *doing* something and thinking forward: proposing modes of resistance to the utter destruction being wrought, and energizing the masses. Going against my own professional bent as a historian, I say let’s not get mired so much in the immediate past and navel gazing. Read Thomas Edsall’s column and act on the sense of urgency he uncovers and which so many of us feel these days.
Uncovering one of the biggest cover-ups in recent American history is “not news.” Let’s get the media back to “proposing modes of resistance” and “energizing the masses [against Trump],” which is their real job apparently.
Democrats aren’t even slightly upset about all the lies and deceit carried out by their party. If they have any disappointments at all, it’s only that the public saw through it long before this book revealed the full scope of the effort. Trump won because Democrats lied about Biden and then lied about Harris, but only one part of that that registers as problematic to most of them: Trump won.
