The Democrats Cannot Pretend Away Joe Biden’s Mental and Physical Decline

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

 

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

— George Orwell, 1984

 

President Joe Biden is not well. Nowadays this is a truism, but you will recall that once upon a time (and not too long ago in fact) it was forbidden to point this out in public, under threat of social censure. It was obvious enough to me back on August 16, 2021, when I watched with horror as he mumbled and fumbled his way through his Afghanistan withdrawal speech. Partisanship being what it is, people assumed I was upset about the policy itself when I said I couldn’t see him running for office again after that speech — but not so. (I didn’t even disagree with the Afghanistan withdrawal per se, only its disgraceful and reputation-shattering execution.)

 

Instead it was Biden’s demeanor that shocked me: slurred words, a sleepy and distracted tone suggesting periodic loss of mental focus, and his visibly withered face and slump-shouldered bearing. The whole time, I was cringing with an embarrassed empathy that comes not from politics but rather from that human reserve of mercy and shame we all share. He’d already looked slow and out of it during the (abbreviated) 2020 campaign, but his rapid slide since only a year before jarred me. It was ugly and unfortunate to see him looking lost and frail during the speech — the ricketiness of our president revealed to the world, sacrificing not only his own dignity but our national dignity as well. I wanted to turn away, to turn it off. It hurt to watch. It was at that moment that I concluded Joe Biden wasn’t going to be his party’s nominee for president in 2024.

 

So of course I was completely wrong. (I am reliably wrong when it comes to political predictions — set your watch by it.) I was, in fact, immediately told to shut my trap and stop giving voice to such hateful thoughts as “Biden looks an awful lot like a dementia patient,” as if to speak them aloud was to invite the devil into one’s soul. And here we are three years down the road from the summer of 2021, and Joe Biden is running for reelection against Donald Trump. Have things gotten better since then? Or much, much worse?

 

The British way of putting it seems far more appropriate here: Biden is “standing” for election rather than running, and increasingly stock-still at times. Soon he may be sitting for it. As I noted in passing the other day, I suspect the primary reason for this is the shock outcome of the 2022 midterms, where Republicans bricked one of the easiest electoral layups in history — given economic and political fundamentals — by becoming the party of Trumpism and January 6 irredentism. Had the Democrats received their anticipated midterm walloping — instead of retaining the Senate and conceding only the narrowest possible House majority to the GOP, with results that have delighted Matt Gaetz — the pressure on Biden to fulfill his implied promise to be a “bridge to the future” and retire for an open primary would have been immense. Instead, the Democrats were sitting pretty and Biden convinced himself, in his arrogance, that he still had six more years left in him every bit as great as the first two.

 

And as all this was happening, his brain, long since unplugged from any power source, continued to defrost, and has now melted into a puddle of congealed frogurt. What is worse, the decay has either accelerated or become impossible to cloak as the requirements of the campaign force at least some visibility outside of the president’s protective bubble. Now it is too late to be pretended away as a fringe issue — in every poll of the race, it is absolutely top-of-mind for American voters — so it must be spun.

 

The Democratic Party today demands that you reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, and so the drumbeat from its willing foot soldiers in the media begins. Did you notice that Biden happens to wander off aimlessly during public events like an old man unaware of the basics of protocol, or even where he is? Did you notice that he occasionally freezes up like an old, mentally unsure man? Then you are being lied to by the dark arts of disinformation. “Misleading GOP Videos of Biden Are Going Viral. The Fact-Checks Have Trouble Keeping Up” reads the NBC News headline. They’re deepfakes (“cheap fakes” is the term they prefer). “The videos are edited,” we are told, or ripped out of context.

 

Friends, the videos are not edited. At the end of last week a confused Biden, appearing at a G-7 event, slowly shuffled away from the other bewildered world leaders during a group photograph until being gently corralled by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Biden’s defenders immediately shouted: “It’s deceptively edited! You’re being fed a false narrative and also Meloni is a Nazi or something!” She is not, and this is not edited. Look at the absolutely frigid, rictus expression on Biden’s uncomprehending face as he puts on sunglasses. Look at Meloni’s unfeigned concern as she watches Biden wander off, and the graceful little dance she does to get him back into the group photograph. Was she being fed an edited, fake narrative right there on the spot? Were Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron, both of whom looked equally perplexed and mortified?

 

Twenty-four hours later, Joe Biden attended a Hollywood fundraiser — this time complete not only with all the celebrities you stopped caring about somewhere around 2015, but also Barack Obama as well. (To be clear: He was there in order to induce the celebrities to attend.) And the president, folks . . . well, he just sort of “froze up” again. Standing on stage, waving to the audience, his face suddenly blanks and he goes into vaporlock like a computer without enough available RAM. Obama, standing by his side onstage, notices and gently puts his hand on Grandpa Joe’s arm to lead him way. It was yet another alarming moment for a president who seemingly now displays them with each public appearance.

 

After videos of the fundraiser taken by the Hollywood Reporter spread over social media, Karine Jean-Pierre shamelessly took a planted question from the audience in the White House Press Room to denounce them (using the new agreed-upon buzz-term) as “cheap fake videos.” There was no logic to the accusation; nothing had been altered, edited selectively, or even taken out of context. But it was an inconvenient fact, and so the Democratic Party has declared it should not exist. It is fake and you are a rube for trusting your eyes over their reassurances. Even more hilariously, Democratic message-pushers took to social media not only to scream that the unbroken footage was somehow “deceptively edited,” but to insist you watch “what really happened” — a comically edited piece with multiple camera angles that quickly cuts to an impossibly long view the moment Biden freezes up. Deny the evidence of your eyes and ears.

 

This is only going to get worse. There is a presidential debate in less than ten days, and although I anticipate Biden will be pumped full of so much Ritalin before the show that he could sit for an SAT afterward, every eye in America will be on him, looking for verbal slips and gaffes. The narrative is both pre-set and, for once, accurate: This is a man on the verge of geriatric collapse. If Biden gives even another braying State of the Union–level performance — deliriously applauded by partisans at the time as proof of his vigor but empirically unpersuasive to voters, who knew better — he is going to eliminate any advantage he might derive from Trump’s impending sentencing.

 

But most of all I reflect upon how horrifying it is to have — not only as one of our major party’s nominees but as an incumbent president — a man who is intellectually no longer capable of satisfying the basic requirements of the job. The progression downward is terrifying, not the least reason being that it seems to be accelerating, as end-stage situations often do. (After all, Biden’s mental decline has progressed notably since the last time I wrote about Biden’s mental decline, and that was in March.) And here is an utterly ironclad prediction that for once I ask you to bank on: This mental decline will continue. Because that is the inevitable way of all such declines. They do not stop, much less reverse. They continue onward, and more often than not accelerate into helpless senescence.

 

Joe Biden remains our president. He may yet be again. We cannot avoid reckoning with that possibility. Yet the Democratic Party insists as it asks for votes that Americans ignore the evidence of their senses and the fears within their hearts about his sharp mental and physical decline. They insult us for believing that which is true merely because it is manifestly obvious. They command us to support them not merely grudgingly but with a mindlessly smiling willingness to believe that up is down, at least for the time being. They demand our vote and then intellectually charge us for the privilege. Will the voters obey?