Yes, Our President Was Senile for a Long Stretch

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

 

The Morning Jolt, June 20, 2022:

 

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.

 

I just wish the lottery numbers were so easy to predict.

 

Enjoy these days of Joe Biden getting knocked around like a piñata, because after Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have sold all the books they can, the story of the coverup of Joe Biden’s failing physical and mental health is going to disappear like the subject of a David Copperfield prime-time special. It’s just too embarrassing, too harmful to the Democrats’ priorities now, too much of a benefit to Donald Trump and Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yesterday, on CNN:

 

Kasie Hunt: You were in there, you saw him up close and personal. Did you really not have any idea that he was not fit to serve a second term?

 

Schumer: Casey, we’re looking forward. We have the largest Medicaid cut in front of us. We have the whole federal government–

 

Hunt: You’re facing all of this because you lost a presidential election. And is that not Joe Biden’s responsibility for deciding to run again?

 

Schumer: We’re looking forward.

 

[long pause]

 

Hunt: That’s it?

 

Schumer: That’s it.

 

Yesterday, the New Yorker magazine published the first lengthy excerpt from Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the book Tapper and Thompson co-wrote that is being released May 20. In the excerpt, the authors describe President Biden’s disturbing interaction with George Clooney at the big Hollywood fundraiser, June 13th, 2024:

 

The President appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him, in December, 2022. He was taking tiny steps, and an aide seemed to be guiding him by the arm.

 

“It was like watching someone who was not alive,” a Hollywood V.I.P. recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.”

 

“Thank you for being here,” the President said to guests as he shuffled past them. “Thank you for being here.” Clooney felt a knot form in his stomach as the President approached him. Biden looked at him. “Thank you for being here,” he said. “Thank you for being here.”

 

“You know George,” the assisting aide told the President, gently reminding him who was in front of him. “Yeah, yeah,” the President said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fund-raiser. “Thank you for being here.”

 

“Hi, Mr. President,” Clooney said.

 

“How are ya?” the President replied.

 

“How was your trip?” Clooney asked.

 

“It was fine,” the President said.

 

It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney.

 

“It was not O.K.,” recalled the Hollywood V.I.P. who had witnessed this moment. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know — especially a famous person who’s doing a f***ing fund-raiser for you — it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.”

 

“George Clooney,” the aide clarified for the President.

 

“Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!”

 

Clooney was shaken to his core. The President hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years.

 

Biden first met Clooney in 2001 and interacted with him regularly since 2006. By the time of that Hollywood fundraiser last year, Joe Biden had no idea who he was.

 

Biden remained president for another seven months and eight days.

 

They later add:

 

Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.

 

Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking — barely audibly — and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside. At other moments, during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.

 

On the Corner yesterday, I wrote about another excerpt from the book confirming that “since at least 2022 Biden has been increasingly prone to lose his train of thought and struggle to remember the names of top aides.” (You may recall that in one of Biden’s last media appearances before withdrawing from the race, he couldn’t remember the name of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin during an interview with Black Entertainment Television and referred to him as “the black man.”)

 

If Joe Biden no longer recognized people he had known for years — including his own cabinet officials! — he should not have been president, period, full stop. The White House is not a retirement home. Why was this controversial? Why was this obvious truth denied? Why did the likes of Delaware Senator Chris Coons attack other people for publicly expressing the same doubts about Biden he privately held?

 

Mass delusion gripped the entire Democratic Party, and they talked themselves into believing they could carry a senile president over the reelection finish line, Weekend at Bernie’s–style, if everyone just tried hard enough to gaslight the public. And as far as we can tell, at no point did any of them pause to contemplate the potential consequences for the country.

 

There’s something grimly satisfying about the bitter recriminations laid out in the concluding pages of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s new book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, as the Democrats grapple with the fact that their own leaders misled them about the reality of the 2024 presidential race every step of the way.

 

Three weeks after Election Day, top Kamala Harris campaign staffers appeared on Pod Save America and contended their internal polling always showed the vice president trailing. “It was hard for Democratic voters to tell what was real,” Allen and Parnes write. “They had been led to believe that Joe Biden was in fighting shape. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe he was locked in a dead-heat race with Trump. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe that [Kamala] Harris was in a position to win. But she wasn’t. And now they were being led to believe she never had a chance. That wasn’t really true, either.”

 

And in the preceding 287 pages, we keep getting anecdotes indicating things had gone terribly, glaringly, obviously wrong in the Democrats’ world, but no one wanted to admit it and confront the problems.

 

After his disastrous debate performance, President Biden attempted to reassure a group of unnerved Democratic governors by telling them he would no longer plan to appear at events past 8 in the evening. Allen and Parnes say one governor later quipped, “Somebody better tell the Chinese when they can attack us, because I don’t want them to wake him up.”

 

If the president can’t physically or mentally function well in the evening hours, why is he still president? How would he handle a sustained emergency like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he’d need to make tough decisions after long days?

 

Allen and Parnes describe Biden aides calling up doubtful Democratic donors before his withdrawal and threatening them, “You want her? Look at her polling. No one wants her. Forget it.” One donor tells the authors, “They were aggressively saying that we would wind up with the vice president and that would be a mistake.” The argument that Harris is a self-evident disaster was characterized by Biden staffers as their “ace in the hole.”

 

If nominating Harris was such an obvious catastrophe . . . why was she vice president? At any moment, the 82-year-old Biden could keel over or have an aneurysm, and she would be the nominee anyway. For that matter, didn’t anybody on the president’s staff foresee any potential downside to trashing the veep?

 

If, as Allen and Parnes report, in the weeks leading up to the debate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was so nervous that he couldn’t sleep at night and his aides had to remind him to eat, wasn’t that a glaring sign that this guy wasn’t ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The duties of the vice-presidency include tasks even more intimidating than debating JD Vance.

 

No one in any position of leadership in the Democratic Party in 2024 should have been there. None of them were up to the task before them.

 

In that New Yorker excerpt, a Biden spokesperson tells Tapper and Thompson, “No one has been able to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.”

 

Bullcrap.

 

In 2021, Biden insisted during his infamously short-tempered interview with George Stephanopoulos that no one had recommended keeping a small group of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to keep order at the airport or anywhere else, specifically stating, “No one said that to me that I can recall.” A few months later, under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. CENTCOM Commander General Frank McKenzie, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley both said they had recommended President Biden maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

 

Either McKenzie and Milley lied under oath to Congress, or Biden genuinely did not remember what his advisers had recommended.

 

There are few crimes in Washington more denounced than being right too early.

 

ADDENDA: The pro-life beat is not an easy one, even in the world of conservative journalism. Plenty of otherwise conservative news consumers aren’t so ardent in their opposition to abortion, and even some pro-lifers recoil and prefer to avert their eyes from the brutal truths about the procedure and its consequences. My longtime friend (and onetime boss!) Kathryn Jean Lopez gets up every morning and fights for the unborn, with empathy, compassion, and conviction.

 

You’re going to want to check out her new weekly newsletter focusing on pro-life issues, The Lifeline. Sign up here, or check out the inaugural edition here.

 

Hey, you haven’t heard many big-name Democrats defending circuit court judge Hannah Dugan lately, have you? She’s the judge accused of attempting to help an illegal immigrant slip out the back door of the Milwaukee courthouse, as federal agents attempted to arrest him. Why, it’s almost as if those big-name Democrats finally caught up with the known facts about the case, and belatedly realized her actions are indefensible — or at least, they don’t want to stick their necks out for her, or climb out on that shaky limb.

 

A federal grand jury indicted Dugan yesterday:

 

A federal grand jury indicted Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan on May 13 on charges that she tried to assist an undocumented immigrant escape arrest from her courtroom last month, putting her at the center of the growing dispute between President Donald Trump and the judiciary.

 

The two-page indictment accuses Dugan, 66, of obstructing a U.S. agency and concealing an individual to prevent an arrest. The two charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine, but sentences in cases involving nonviolent offenses typically are much shorter.

 

Now, an indictment is just one half the story; Dugan will have her day in court (as a defendant, not as a judge.) On April 29, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered Dugan temporarily relieved of her duties.

 

Andy McCarthy may be correct that winning a conviction against Dugan will be difficult, particularly with a Milwaukee jury. But apparently the U.S. Department of Justice likes their odds.