The Taboo Lifts on Discussing Biden’s Age

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, June 20, 2022

 

Did you notice that discussing Joe Biden’s age, memory, and mental state — denounced as the “gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life” by CNN’s Chris Cillizza when I wrote about this issue last August — became an acceptable subject for quiet and subdued expressions of public concern in the past week or so?

 

This isn’t about Biden falling off his bicycle. Last week, Mark Leibovich wrote in the Atlantic that Biden shouldn’t run for another term because, in his view, though Biden’s mental sharpness and physical health are just fine right now, they might not be in a few years:

 

They say, for the most part, that Biden is coping fine. You know, despite the 8.6 percent inflation, his depressed approval numbers, his vice president’s worse approval numbers, the looming wipeout in the midterms, and all the other delights attending to Biden as he awaits the big, round-numbered birthday he has coming up in a few months. But here’s another recurring theme I keep hearing, notably from people predisposed to liking the president. “He just seems old,” one senior administration official told me at a social function a few weeks ago.

 

He seems old, you say? Hmm. Has anyone else noticed this?

 

Last week the New York Times quoted many Democratic officials as worrying that Biden was too old to run for reelection. Brian Stelter and John Harwood talked about the issue and the Atlantic article on CNN. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal chuckles, “Democrats and the media suddenly discover the President is old.”

 

Hey, seemingly overnight, discussing Joe Biden’s age, memory, and mental state isn’t “gross, lowest-common-denominator politics” anymore!

 

Back when the Afghan government was collapsing, Biden disappeared from public view for four days and then took no questions from the press for another few days. When he did do a sit-down interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden insisted he had never been told by General Frank McKenzie of U.S. Central Command and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that they recommended keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan or had any other concerns about a full withdrawal: “No one said that to me that I can recall.” The two generals later testified under oath that they had made that recommendation directly to the president.

 

At the time, I noted that Biden had not released any updates on his health since December 2019 and surmised that something is wrong with the president. The most generous interpretation is that Biden was a shameless liar, eager to blame his staff for the consequences of his own bad decisions. But the other, even more troubling possibility is that Biden simply didn’t remember what he was briefed on a few months earlier. “Something is wrong with President Biden, and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice,” I wrote.

 

Later, Biden released a letter from his doctor declaring he “remains fit for duty.”

 

We can see that the president rarely does more than one public event each day, and rarely attends events at night. We can see that the president goes home to Delaware almost every weekend — leaving the White House for Rehoboth Beach at 11 a.m. Friday morning. We can see that about four months passed between Biden’s sit-down interviews with NBC’s Lester Holt and then his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, where the president offered up his usual trailing half-sentences and fragmented thoughts. In one ramble with Kimmel, he said, “You turn on the TV, look at the ads, when’s the last time you saw biracial couples on TV? When’s the last time you saw the way, I mean, people are selling products, they do ads and sell products and they say products when people they appeal to people.”

 

Joe Biden is 79 years and seven months old. The presidency is one of the toughest jobs in the world. It is partially an issue of mental and verbal discipline, which were never Biden’s strengths to begin with. But now he’s overwhelmed by the problems of the job and coping through denial. Last week, he finally did another sit-down interview in which he contended to the Associated Press that “every other major industrial country in the world” has higher inflation, which is not even close to the case. Biden insisted that there is “zero evidence” that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021 contributed to inflation, and that it did not have even a “marginal, minor impact on inflation.” He said Americans should not believe warnings about a possible recession. With every available indicator pointing to a GOP tsunami in the midterm elections, Biden insisted that Democrats would not merely keep control of the House and Senate but would “pick up as many as four seats in the Senate.”

 

Biden, who pledged to “shut down the virus” and make Saudi Arabia a pariah state, declared, “I made a commitment and I think I can say that I’ve never broken, if I make a commitment.”

 

Biden walks around in a foggy realm in which he is always just trying to do the right thing, the solutions are obvious and simple, his policies are working and just need more time, and every problem besetting the country is the fault of Republicans, Vladimir Putin, or greedy corporations. Everything that goes wrong is just bad luck — “locusts!” — and he would have had to be a “mind reader” to foresee the country’s current problems.

 

I think the single most predictable “bombshell” of the coming years is that sometime in 2025, someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa will publish a book with a title like “Perpetual Crisis: Inside the Biden White House,” and we will “learn” something like:

 

The president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties. His speech was becoming less and less coherent, his thinking more erratic, his mood shifts more intense, and he angrily lashed out at routine advice or recommendations. He insisted he had not been told things he had been briefed on and that his wrong statements were correct. He repeatedly insisted the U.S. had committed to protecting Taiwan, when no treaty required it. When asked about this, Biden insisted no policy had changed. At almost every public appearance, no matter how much he had been instructed to stick to the teleprompter’s prepared remarks, Biden would go off script and add some comment or outburst — like “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” — that undermined his message and created new foreign -policy headaches.

 

But the first lady, Klain, and Rice all concurred that Biden’s problems could be hidden from the public, at least for now, and that Vice President Harris taking over was unthinkable — both because it would be too traumatic for the country and because they had little faith in Harris’s ability to defeat Trump or DeSantis in 2024. Either man entering the Oval Office in January would put nothing less than all of American democracy at risk. For the good of the country, Biden had to stay in place, and his cognitive decline hidden — much as FDR’s disability, JFK’s back pain, and Woodrow Wilson’s stroke had been hidden before. 

 

Biden’s public appearances grew less and less frequent, and he virtually stopped doing sit-down interviews. Late at night, Klain and Rice would get together, satisfied they had kept the ship sailing for another day. All the while, the public had no idea that Biden was in such rough shape.

 

Though it will be treated like a bombshell revelation, the fact is we all have eyes and ears and can see and hear Biden.

 

As of this writing, Biden has no public events on his schedule for today.