The Night the 2024 Race Changed Forever

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, January 04, 2025

 

Over at the Carnival of Fools, I’ve foolishly undertaken to write up the Year in Review for National Review. Part one (covering January through late June) rang in the New Year last Tuesday. Part two, covering the pell-mell madness of July and onward, arrives on Tuesday morning. (Obligatory plug: Subscribe!)

 

But today I wanted to specifically address the hinge-point: June 27, when Joe Biden stepped onstage for the first and last debate of his 2024 campaign for the presidency. The first presidential debate effectively ended Joe Biden’s electoral career on the spot. I consider it not only the most important moment of the year, but of the decade: You will have to cast all the way back to the darkness of September of 2001 for a more dramatically pivotal moment in American politics.

 

The reality of Biden’s concealed mental collapse — a fundamental deception foisted upon America by a cadre of advisers and a complicit party with Biden’s consent — not only ended his reelection campaign, it revealed his entire administration to be one giant ongoing fraud. It also confirmed our mainstream media as functionally worthless: either “benevolently incurious” about Biden’s years-long decay for vulgarly partisan reasons, or appallingly incompetent beyond all rational description.

 

Biden’s meltdown — in front of the cameras, in front of the American voters, before the eyes of the entire world — was written about endlessly and eloquently by everyone else here at the time. The others, being faster writers than me, quickly pointed out the obvious: that Biden’s rictus-faced, slurred performance was so devastatingly inarticulate that it not only ruled out any idea of his serving another four years, it called into question his fitness to continue in office even one more day. I was left only to add a paraphrase of Kingsley Amis’s legendary apocryphal retitling of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: “We Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”

 

It was worth pointing out. For what was, merely one day before, verboten to say in polite media company — that Joe Biden was a mental invalid being shielded from coverage by his handlers and an eagerly servile press — became instantly and undeniably known to all, beyond hope of concealment. In part one of the “Year in Review” I wrote about how the first half of 2024 felt naggingly irrelevant and frivolous, wasted discussing everything but the single most important story in the country:

 

This nags at me because I feel like our attentions were intentionally misdirected. All along, there was really only one important political story the media should have been focused on: the mental decay of President Joe Biden as he sought another four years in office. Throughout that period the story was consistently ignored by everyone except conservatives, until it was far too late for excuses.

 

We now know of course that indeed this was the case: that all along, we were being sinisterly misdirected by an administration seeking to conceal the mental and physical collapse of the president as he ran for four more years in office. This attempted sleight of hand fooled nobody — neither conservatives nor the voting public at large — because politics isn’t amateur stage magic. The only ones fooled, curiously enough? Partisan professional Democrats and the mainstream media.

 

Their shared underlying motivations were as obvious then as they are disgraceful now, given the media’s magisterial pretensions. Spin it whichever way you wish: Both Democrats and the media either wished to fool America into thinking Biden had a functioning brain or, at the very least (and arguably far worse) wished to be fooled by the magic act themselves. The problem is that magic isn’t real. Biden and his handlers were incapable of conjuring even a semi-lucid version of the man, presenting only a half-animate shell instead. (It is not enough to merely make a president disappear; you need to make him reappear as well for the trick to actually work.)

 

It would be easy enough to think of 2024 as a failed magic trick botched by a bunch of legendary bunglers who nevertheless demand to be taken seriously. The problem with that is there’s far too much comedy in that image, and nothing about what we suffered through this year was funny in the slightest. The fundamental falsehood of the entire Biden administration — as a fraud, as a front half-openly run by unelected advisers — is a political and civic travesty beyond all American comprehension.