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President Biden’s Aides Worked for Years to Conceal His Progressive Decline
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The Wall Street Journal has released a blockbuster investigative report exposing a long-running White House cover-up, about what the article called President Biden’s “mental fitness decline” during his term in office.
Drawing on interviews with nearly 50 people—current and former White House staffers who interacted directly with the president—the report revealed that Biden’s cognitive issues were apparent within the first few months of his term.
Now that his time in office is coming to an end, these individuals were willing to talk about a carefully guarded secret: how an inner circle of aides worked for years to protect Joe Biden by limiting access to him, and hiding his cognitive decline for as long as it was possible.
The 3,800-word Wall Street Journal report takes the story from summer 2021 all the way to Biden’s humiliating June debate with Donald Trump. As the report tells it, the White House sought to conceal Biden’s diminishing abilities even from his own supporters and cabinet members.
The document is replete with anecdotes that, taken together, confirm that Biden was little better than a shell of a president during his term in office, a front for an unelected group of top aides who sent the country reeling from one international and domestic disaster to another.
It was a dysfunctional system that led to disastrous setbacks in economic, immigration, and international policy that have tainted the Biden Era. This 4-year debacle was led by a head of state who began his term virtually half-asleep at the wheel, the WSJ article reveals.
Gaslighting the Public
As questions about Biden’s mental acuity persisted, White House spokesmen and media personalities launched a passionate defense of the president’s fitness.
Their strategy was essentially to deny the accumulating evidence of the president’s mental decline, to rationalize it and make it sound normal, and attack anyone who dared challenge the deception.
In the weeks and months leading up to the game-changing debate with Trump, critics of Joe Biden raised alarm over his fitness for office, pointing to a series of photos and videos which suggested the President often appeared disoriented by his surroundings.
In each instance, Biden’s media operatives struck back. They slammed Republicans for “doctoring” audio, images, and video to mislead the public. “Cheap fakes,” Biden allies called the video evidence.
The political landscape in which this elaborate farce played out was reminiscent of a famous line in George Orwell’s “1984,” the classic novel about a totalitarian society, in which people are expected to deny what they know to be true in order to align with the regime’s Ministry of Truth.
“The Party,” the book’s narrator stated, “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their most essential command.”
In a similar vein, the White House charade, bolstered by a complicit media, gaslit the public for years, urging them to dismiss the evidence of their own senses.
Pushing The Charade
A popular MSNBC talk show host dubbed “Morning Joe (Scarborough)” lashed out at Biden’s critics for questioning his mental stamina, claiming he was at the peak of his powers.
“Some people are not going to like what I’m about to say, but this is the truth,” Morning Joe declared. “Joe Biden is far more than just cogent; he is intellectually and analytically the very best he’s ever been.”
“Behind closed doors, he is strong, vigorous, on top of his game, sharp as a tack,” a White House spokesman asserted, failing to explain why these qualifications were manifest only behind “closed doors.”
News anchor Chris Cillizza, formerly of The Washington Post and CNN, attacked Biden critics for daring to put into words their questions and doubts about Biden’s cognitive status.
“Republicans are always trying to make Biden’s mental capacity an issue,” Cillizza fumed back in August 2021. “If they have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward or stop doing what they’re doing!”
This was months after White House aides had begun secretly rescheduling national-security briefings because the president “had good days and bad days.”
By then, Biden had already called Kamala Harris the “president-elect” and “President Harris” on two separate occasions, repeatedly struggled to regain his train of thought during a press conference. He had referred to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as “My ….uh….the guy who runs that outfit over there,” a NY Post editorial recounted.
No one needed to ‘bring proof forward’; it was staring everyone in the face. Top Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and many others, including the Obamas and other party elites, had to at least suspect the truth, argued the NY Post.
Yet White House aides denied there was anything amiss, insisting that Biden was fit to run the country, and Republicans were just out to malign him. Cillizza and colleagues from the mainstream media played along.
A NY Times piece from 2001 stands out as a striking example of the paper’s gaslighting technique. The article portrayed President Biden as guiding his policy experts through in-depth analysis and robust discussions on complex issues.
“Before making up his mind,” the NY Times rhapsodized, “the president demands hours of detail-laden debate from scores of policy experts, taking everyone around him on what some in the West Wing refer to as his Socratic ‘journey’ before arriving at a conclusion.”
Socratic journey? In light of the just-released WSJ report testifying to the president’s reduced attention span and his mind-wandering, the Times article exudes more than a whiff of mendacity.
The Afghanistan Fiasco
The article details that even urgent, time-sensitive briefings were cancelled at times, due to the president having “a bad day.”
Even during the lead-up to the calamitous pullout of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021, senior officials — including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and prominent congressional Democrats — admitted having difficulty securing meetings with the president.
The Journal recounts one instance during the spring of 2021, shortly before the Afghanistan withdrawal, when Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wa., who chaired the Armed Services Committee, tried to meet with Biden to warn him about the disastrous withdrawal strategy. But Smith’s meeting was abruptly cancelled after an aide explained that the president was having “an off day.”
Lack of adequate communication and briefings with key military advisors, critics say, may have precipitated the chaotic retreat from Kabul later that year.
The fiasco culminated in the deaths of 13 American service members in a suicide bombing at the city’s airport. It also left billions of dollars of military equipment in the hands of the Taliban, marking the debacle one of the lowest points of the Biden Era.
Were Aides Running The Country?
The WSJ document revealed that President Biden and his allies tried to compensate for his symptoms by leaning on a close circle of unelected advisers and officials who assumed roles usually occupied by the president.
The officials who stood in for the president in a variety of scenarios included National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, National Economic Council head Lael Brainard, as well as his wife, Jill Biden who on at least one occasion, took over a Cabinet meeting for her husband, the report says.
“At events, these and other aides often repeated instructions to Biden, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person,” the article elaborated. Members of his tight, protective inner circle hired an expert voice coach to help the president conceal his “fading warble” and project a more vigorous image to the public.
The article details another scheme by the president’s aides to limit people’s access to him, and to minimize face-to-face meetings with members of Congress and even Biden’s Cabinet appointees. The team cleverly exploited pandemic protection protocols, like six-foot distancing and remote meetings, to help hide Biden’s blunders.
“The shell constructed for the pandemic,” the Journal explained, “was never fully taken down for Biden.”
According to the report, Biden quickly tired and didn’t function well in the mornings, so all his meetings were scheduled later in the day, kept brief and strictly to the point. Eventually, only those deemed of major importance were included in his schedule.
The cover-up continued even as the president’s disorientation increased, culminating in the disastrous debate against Donald Trump, when Biden appeared lost or dazed, often trailing off into silence or blurting out incoherent half-statements.
With the president’s abject performance and his carefully constructed façade in shambles, everything changed.
Biden Defenders Switch Course
A month after the publicized debate disaster before 48 million American viewers, with doubts multiplying about the president’s capacity to serve a second term, even ardent supporters like the New York Times editorial board changed their tune, calling on Biden to drop out of the race “to serve his country.”
MSNBC’s Morning Joe was quick to follow.
“I should have pushed harder, earlier, for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline,” the talk show host admitted in a recorded mea culpa.
Describing some of the debate’s most humiliating moments for Biden, Morning Joe was painfully explicit. “The president spent much of the night with his mouth agape and his eyes darting back and forth,” he added, apparently hoping to shore up his own damaged credibility. “He couldn’t fact-check anything Donald Trump said. He missed one layup after another after another.”
This information was presented as if it were a “shock” to Morning Joe, who had so recently and emphatically declared that Joe Biden was intellectually in top form.
The talk show host now concluded that this moment “is the last chance for Democrats to decide whether this man we’ve known and loved for a very long time is up to the task of running for president of the United States.”
The sudden light bulb moment from the press after the debate left many people skeptical.
“The fact that now they’re telling you they didn’t know that Biden was this [compromised] is just the latest of the media’s fantastic fibs,” wrote the Boston Herald.
“In terms of Big Lies, this one is right up there with the Russian collusion hoax and the Hunter Biden-laptop scandal. Not to mention all the lies they peddled about Covid that are just now trickling out,” the article declared.
“Already, at the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden was showing visible signs of major mental decline. All of this was concealed from the world. And this man acquiesced with the deception and ran for reelection. This is surely one of the worst political and media scandals of our era.”
*****
Puncturing the Taboo
Few were the responsible publications willing to buck the elaborate farce orchestrated by President Biden’s inner team to conceal his diminishing abilities.
Yated was one of the handful of voices willing to take a stand by disclosing the true state of affairs within the White House. Its editor, Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, made it a priority to inform readers of the president’s cognitive deterioration. More than once, he pointed to the dangers that his re-election would pose for the country and the Torah community.
“Apparently, even his own people don’t trust him to read a statement live from his teleprompter, even on a topic as important as his reelection,” Rabbi Lipschutz noted in a May 2023 editorial. “They had him announce in a video that he is running so that, in his words, he can “finish the job” he started.
“Like the video, everything pertaining to Biden and his campaign is scripted and counts on the mainstream media playing along, literally campaigning for Joe Biden him because he can’t do it himself,” the article continued. It underscored how “every time the president does speak out, he demonstrates his incompetence and how disastrous his policies are.”
The editorial went on to sound the alarm about the folly of voting in Biden for another term in office, and of empowering the liberals and Democrats who seek to advance “woke” ideology and the dissolution of traditional family life in this country.
“This is a battle between whether the United States should remain a country of traditional democratic religious values or become a socialist anti-religious ‘paradise’,” Yated’s editor wrote. “We are deluding ourselves if we think that ‘wokism,’ with its goal of uprooting the foundations of civilized society, won’t affect us.”
“Every check next to a Democrat name,” the article stressed, “is a vote against religion, against morality, against capitalism, and against everything that has allowed us to grow and prosper.”
*****
A Bizarre History of Deception
A striking op-ed by a senior member of the Heritage Foundation argues that for President Joe Biden, running a campaign of deception about his mental fitness is consistent with a long-running history of fabrications, many of which reflect a startling disconnect from reality.
The writer flashes back to the 1988 presidential race, when a senator for Delaware running for president had brazenly stolen a speech by a Welsh Labor Party leader in the United Kingdom.
“When caught, the senator paid the price by humiliatingly dropping out of the 1988 presidential race,” wrote author Mike Gonzales. “That senator was President Joe Biden.”
The writer enumerated a string of public falsehoods made by President Biden over the years—several of which blatantly contradicted established facts—and criticized the media for failing to fact-check them.
“Sometimes Biden’s fabrications were just so weird that they made you wonder if he was all there,” the op-ed continued.
The author cited Biden’s insistence that his “Uncle Bosie” was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II, as one example of his being divorced from reality.
The Defense Department was forced to put out a statement that to the contrary, Biden’s uncle, Ambrose Finnegan was lost when his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
According to the Heritage Foundation author, Biden has also lied about graduating in the top half of his law school class, and having his house ‘burn down with my wife in it.’ He also habitually lies about former President Donald Trump “leaving behind a 9% inflation rate. Inflation was 1.4% in January 2021.”
Lies That Make Listeners Cringe
The author notes that Biden’s “habitual mendacity” often makes his listeners cringe. “A case in point is when he told the mothers of the 13 soldiers killed in Afghanistan because of his ill-conceived pullout in 2021 that he “could feel their pain because his son, Beau Biden, had also died in the war.”
“We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin,” Biden told Cheryl Rex, whose son died in the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.
It was not the first time Biden has uttered this falsehood, the op-ed asserts. “Joe Biden has a history of saying that Beau Biden “lost his life in Iraq.” The facts are that his son Beau died of cancer at the age of 46 in 2015, at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
That the truth about his son’s death is widely known does not deter Biden from repeating the whopper that Beau lost his life in Iraq, which experts say is a mark of either senility or an almost pathological need to lie.
“This habitual lying was on display in the president’s televised train-wreck of a debate with Trump on June 27, when he lied about not having any military deaths during his term in office,” the op-ed continued.
“I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any, I mean this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” Joe Biden said at one point, ignoring the 13 body bags from the attack during his Afghanistan withdrawal.
Bizarrely, Joe Biden actually touted his honesty to the public when confronted with questions about his reputed cognitive decline. No, he doesn’t debate as well as he used to, he angrily retorted at a rally, but “I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!”
“And the media continues to back him up,” the op-ed concludes, “regurgitating a new White House talking point: Joe Biden may or may not be mentally diminished, [depending on whether you trust your own senses over the media], but unlike Trump, he’s a truth-teller!”
How can one reconcile Biden’s long history of telling wild stories with being “a truth-teller?” Perhaps by considering the NY Times’s euphemism for habitual lying, as expressed in a 2022 editorial that observed that “President Biden has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity.”
Embellishing narratives. It’s not that he’s lying, you understand. No, not at all.
