For Four Years We Have Had a Ghost for a President, and We Were Lied to about It All Along

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, December 19, 2024

 

The Wall Street Journal is out today with a toweringly important story documenting how President Joe Biden’s close-knit circle of advisers sought to swindle the public, the press, and even Biden’s legislative allies and cabinet appointees about the rapidly deteriorating state of the president’s mental health. It’s a 3,800-word, deeply sourced blockbuster that takes the story from summer 2021 — keep that date in your back pocket for a moment — all the way to the last desperate month after Biden’s debate meltdown. It is the first in what I anticipate will be a series of deeply reported “what went wrong” stories on the Biden White House emerging from the mainstream media — “Now the real story can be told!” — since the race is over and Trump won. (Keep that thought in your back pocket as well, while we’re at it.)

 

Jim, Charlie, and Dan have already written about this — we more or less carved out our separate angles this morning, because it’s such a major story — but I want to emphasize one thing most of all, and I want to do it by quoting Kingsley Amis’s response to being proven right about Stalinist Russia: “We told you so, you f***ing fools.” It is important for me to point this out, and not because I am vain (though I am) or because I want to praise the incredible prescience and big brains of National Review’s staff (though they are indeed beguilingly large), but rather for a far more sobering reason.

 

Before we get there, however, I advise you to read every word of the WSJ piece, because the enormity of it all should not be lost upon Americans: Even if you think you knew this story, you really didn’t know anything at all about the details until today. To excerpt it at length would be to do it an injustice; there are so many anecdotes, piling up chronologically in escalating despair as the lengthy exposé proceeds, that by the end you are left reeling with anger at the near-criminal irresponsibility of Biden and his staff. I will quote but one paragraph:

 

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

 

I read this with a clenched fist. In spring 2021 — that is to say, only a month or two after Biden took office — our commander in chief was already having “good days” and “bad days.” I want to say that again: 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 ran for reelection.

 

After reading through the Journal’s report twice I have provisionally concluded that, despite all the various financial scandals, crony corruption, authoritarian overreach, and third-rate burglaries in American politics, this is the biggest scandal the presidency has ever seen, because it runs to the core of what the presidency is supposed to be. For practically his entire term, Joe Biden has been, if not non compos mentis — on a rare “good day” — then at least severely mentally diminished or periodically incapacitated. At no point during his time in office has he been fit for the presidency.

 

The only other American scandal this elemental — one that risks the entire premise of executive government, that the president and not some shadowy cabal is the sole elected decision-maker — is the eeriest historical parallel of them all: Edith Wilson’s concealment from the public of her husband Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 stroke. She acted as de facto president for the rest of his term, and her imperious incompetence destroyed the effort to ratify Versailles in the Senate, ensuring the failure of Wilson’s internationalist legacy. Much the same could be said about the historically disastrous economic, immigration, and international policy drift of the Biden Era — as might well be expected from a president who began his term already asleep at the wheel.

 

I will have more to say about this later on tonight — I asked you hold those thoughts at the top of this piece in your back pocket for a reason. For now, however, there is no getting around the revolting fact that we have been subjected to four years of a farcical semi-presidency, one whose drift is now so easily explained by the simple fact that Biden was little better than a front for an unelected committee of “top men” who sent us careening from one international and domestic disaster to another. We now discover that Biden was all along a mere shell of a president, a babbling Lear whose shameful dotage was kept in more carefully guarded secrecy.

 

And the most shameful aspect of it all was Biden’s acquiescence to this: Detached and unable to remember details, unaware of what his administration was doing, unable to speak without minders to anyone for more than a few minutes, he allowed his staff to run the world and weave a cynical campaign of deception as he sought another four years in office. Don’t feel an ounce of pity for Joe Biden in his advanced senescence as he fades into disgrace; he made love to this employment. He is not near my conscience, nor should he be yours.