They Couldn't Handle the Truth
So journalists covered for Biden—and helped put Trump back in the White House
Among the many destructive consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic was the presidency of Joe Biden.
Had it not been for a Chinese lab leak, Donald Trump would probably be leaving Washington on January 20, 2025. Instead, he’s going to be taking the presidential oath of office for a second time after bringing off the greatest political comeback in American history. And it was Joe Biden’s election in 2020 that paved the way for that comeback.
The pandemic enabled Biden to hide out in Delaware during the 2020 election season, minimizing his exposure to public scrutiny, while Trump’s presidency was going to pieces. The fact that Biden himself was going to pieces was thus concealed from the American people. And enough of them bought the Biden campaign’s narrative that good old Scranton Joe represented a return to normalcy. Out with the chaos of Trump/MAGA! The steady hand of a seasoned political veteran would now steer the ship of state; the adults would be back in charge. But behind the curtain, the candidate’s mental and physical decline was already well underway.
Joe Biden was seventy-eight years old when he became president in January 2021—the same age at which Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, amid speculation that he was showing the early signs of dementia. This probably was so, and it was a legitimate cause for concern. The American presidency is the world’s most demanding job, pitiless in the toll it takes on the holder of that office. Fortunately, Reagan was out of office by the time his condition became acute. But in Biden’s case, the stress and pressure of the presidency was an accelerant that hastened his deterioration over the course of his term.
So we now have an explanation for the incompetence, dysfunction, and moments of low comedy that characterized the Biden Administration: There was no one in charge. Behind the curtain, the executive power was usurped by a cabal of advisors and family members who manipulated the failing president, shaping policy and making decisions on behalf of a man no longer capable of doing so. It’s impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of this scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. Though comparable to the coverup of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, it’s far worse in duration and scope. It was, in effect, a coup.
Only one member of the executive branch of the federal government, the president, is elected by the American people. The Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the president. He’s the ultimate setter of policy and decision maker. And if the individual serving in that position is incapable of doing the job, no one else can pinch-hit for him. That’s why the people around Biden kept him propped up in the front window; that’s why they pretended that all was well with him. They had no authority to exercise the powers of the presidency. It was therefore necessary to maintain the pretense that Joe Biden was President Energizer Bunny, running rings around his staffers, a veritable Lion in Winter. This outright lie was repeated more than once by Biden’s press secretary, the egregious Karine Jean-Pierre.
It may be thought that such a conspiracy would have been hard to maintain. The American president is, after all, a leader in the public eye, not a shadowy presence, a face on a poster, like Mr. Orwell’s Big Brother. And it’s true that the American people did sense that something was wrong with Biden. Polls consistently showed that a robust majority, including many Democrats, thought that the President was too old to run for reelection. But they did not realize the extent of Joe Biden’s deterioration, for those in the White House and the Democratic Party dedicated to concealing it from the American people had powerful collaborators: American journalists.
The cognitive decline of Joe Biden was—or ought to have been—the biggest news story of 2024. But it wasn’t, because much of the media declined to report it.
In the wake of their girl’s humiliating defeat by Donald Trump, Team Kamala and its hangers-on have been whining that the “corporate media” didn’t do enough to shove her across the finish line. This must be eliciting eye rolls from the large cohort of journalists and pundits who all but openly sided with Biden and then Harris against Trump. They cheered the anti-Trump lawfare campaign. The excoriated him every chance they got. They uncritically passed along Administration talking points regarding Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, the economy, the border. And they did their level best to suppress any whisper that maybe, just maybe, Joe Biden was losing his marbles.
When video footage showed Joe Biden wandering aimlessly here and there, stumbling, mumbling, staring vacantly, such scenes were dismissed as “cheap fakes”—a term dreamed up by the media, not the Biden Administration. Suggestions that Biden ought not to be running for reelection were roundly denounced—most hilariously in a diatribe by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that he later had good reason to regret. “Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth,” Scarborough declared. “And f*** you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I’ve known him for years. If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”
Scarborough uttered these words, on air, on March 6, 2024. On June 27, 2024, the “best Biden ever” debated Donald Trump. On July 21, 2024, Joe Biden dropped out of the race—or rather was forced out. His replacement was the decidedly subpar Vice President Kamala Harris. And in that way, the stage was set for Donald Trump’s comeback.
In the aftermath of Biden’s implosion and Harris’s loss to Trump, there have been some mea culpas. CBS News reporter Jan Crawford characterized Biden’s decline as the most underreported story of 2024. “Undercovered and underreported, that would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate,” she said recently on “Face the Nation.” Chris Cillizza, formerly of the Washington Post and CNN, expressed regret over his failure to report on that story. “I should have pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline,” Cillizza admitted.
Yes, Chris, you should have. But you didn’t, and here we are.
It seems fair to ask why, after this debacle, the American people should place their trust in any political story coming from the mainstream media. Almost without exception, major outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, the broadcast networks heaped scorn on the idea that Joe Biden might be unfit to serve as president, much less to run for reelection. Almost certainly they knew better but justified their gaslighting of the public as a noble lie that served a higher purpose: to keep the Ogre Trump out of the White House.
But as if to show that the Spirit of Cosmic Justice possesses a malicious sense of humor, their efforts to buttress the coverup of Joe Biden’s “obvious cognitive decline” produced an outcome exactly the opposite of that intended: On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump, the nation’s forty-fifth president, will be sworn in as its forty-seventh president. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen of the press: You’ve helped to make history.
Thanks for reading…
Excellent post !