Quick Take: Biden in Decline
The President's personal tragedy endangers America
Writing in USA Today, Jill Lawrence deplores President Biden’s stunning mental lapse: his shoutout to a member of Congress who died two months ago. But then she goes on to lipstick the pig:
Yet there’s another way to look at this: Biden was trying to credit the late Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski—a lawmaker who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, to object to his presidential victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania and who this March labeled his agenda “radical & reckless”—for her good work on nutrition and hunger.
Well, no. The only way to look at this is with the realization that the President of the United States is losing it. When Representative Walorski was killed along with three staffers in a horrific traffic accident, the White House put out the usual statement concerning thoughts, prayers, and condolences. Two months later, there was Joe Biden, talking about her as if she were still alive.
It was a frightening moment.
We’ve had impaired presidents before: Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, FDR’s polio, JFK’s multiple health issues. By the end of his second term, it was evident that Ronald Reagan had lost a step or two. But it’s worse now. Halfway through his first term, Joe Biden is in obvious mental decline.
One way or another, it happens to us all. I’m seventy-three, and my mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be. Occasionally I find myself at a loss for the right word, or unable to recall a name, or not remembering where I left my cell phone. Old age, as Charles De Gaulle remarked of Marshal Petain, is a shipwreck. But if we’re lucky, Old Mr. Death won’t deprive us of our mind and memories before he carries us off. Joe Biden should be so lucky, but alas he’s not. And that matters, because he’s the President of the United States. His personal tragedy poses a danger to the country.
The time has come to ask who’s really running things at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I imply no sinister conspiracy; it’s understandable that Biden’s staff and cabinet are doing what they can to relieve the President of as much mental stress as possible. But formally, constitutionally, their power is derivative. The President may delegate responsibility, but he can’t give it away. Everything that happens in the executive branch of our government—the good, the bad, the ugly—comes back to him.
Biden’s disability wouldn’t matter so much if we were living back in the Nineties, at the so-called end of history. But look at the world today. A major war rages in Europe, the first such sanguinary conflict since 1945. The United States and our NATO allies have rallied to the support of Ukraine, and the tide appears to have turned against the aggressor, Russia. That country’s despot, the odious V. Putin, has responded with a litany of nuclear threats. He may be bluffing, but perhaps not. Suppose for a moment that Putin does resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to beat down Ukrainian resistance.
What then?
No president since John F. Kennedy has had to reckon seriously with the possibility of nuclear war. He and his administration successfully weathered the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was a close call. Now here we are again—this time with a commander-in-chief who bit by bit is losing his mind. And it’s not fanciful to think that at a moment of intense crisis, Biden could suffer a complete breakdown.
True, a constitutional remedy is available: the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for the removal, temporary or permanent, of a president with mental or physical disabilities. But would the people around Biden ever resort to such drastic action? No, it’s far more likely that they’ll just carry on, covering for their guy, hoping that whatever happens, they’ll muddle through somehow.
Otto von Bismarck once quipped that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Let’s hope he was right. With Joe Biden in the White House at this moment—God help us.
Thank you for pointing out what is so painfully obvious to anyone who's paying attention. JFK did not suffer cognitive decline before his assassination. Reagan exhibited cognitive problems only in the last year (1988) of his second and last term. (He was diagnosed with dementia in 1990.)
FDR's real problem wasn't his polio, but his heart condition in the 1944 election campaign. A media far more deferential than today's did its best to cover up his condition, but everyone in Washington knew what was happening. That was why the Democratic choice for VP was so important that year, and everyone involved was conscious of it. They did remember Wilson's 1919 stroke.
Nothing shows better the recklessness of the Democratic elites in 2020, with their anti-Trump obsession, and their very consequential blocking of younger candidates. The Democratic contest ended up -- let me be blunt -- as a nursing home fight between a borderline senile senator and an aging dinosaur far-left senator.
The average age of the Democratic leadership today is mid-70s to low 80s, depending on how you count. Have you been following the hushed-up stories about Senator Feinstein? At least the Republicans have younger leadership. In the House, it's a full generation younger.
People do get tired and detached, even without dementia, as my father used to say after he turned 70. While reading Sebastian Mallaby's excellent biography of Alan Greenspan, I was struck by Greenspan's growing detachment after the 2000-2 tech crash. He was aware and made it clear that he was concerned about the subsequent housing bubble, contrary to later myth. But policy was increasingly shaped by Bernanke and others a generation+ younger, following the radical QE and low- to zero-rate policies of Japan. Greenspan turned 70 in 1997 and stayed on as chairman for almost another decade. He was blamed for the 2008 crisis, but it's clear that, after the 1997-98 Asian-Latin American-Russian crisis, he was more a figurehead and cheerleader than someone with a firm hand on the wheel.