By Becket Adams
Sunday, April 06, 2025
The people who told you there was nothing wrong with
former President Biden are excited to discuss all the ways in which there was
absolutely something wrong with former President Biden.
If these people had any capacity for shame, they’d be
feeling it about now.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, where host Joe Scarborough boasted not long before Biden’s disastrous
June 2024 presidential debate performance that “this version of Biden —
intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever,” NBC News’s Jonathan
Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes discussed their new book, which details
the lengths to which the former president’s inner circle reportedly went to
keep his deterioration a secret from voters.
Scarborough and his chirpy co-host, Mika Brzezinski,
nodded along during the segment, as if they were mere spectators to the effort
to hide the president’s condition and not themselves active participants.
“You know,” said Scarborough, “we always look back in
retrospect and think things were a certain way, just because it’s the way the
media, at the time, defined it.”
He added, “I remember after Biden’s shockingly bad
presidential debate, that’s when, like, the history books were starting, you
know, you could just see that was going to be the reason why he was pushed out
of the race, and he was doing badly.”
For the record, in the years leading up to Biden’s
disgraceful exit from the White House, even as everyone with working eyeballs
could tell you something was definitely wrong with the then-chief executive,
Scarborough assured viewers that the president was fit as a fiddle and more
energetic and vital than men half his age.
“He’ll wake me up when I’m asleep at 8:30 at night,
because Mika and I, of course, wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and I’ll just
go. ‘Hello? Yes, sir,’” Scarborough once bragged. “And about an hour later, he
will aggressively and very effectively give me point by point by point about
how my op-ed was flawed.”
In early 2024, Scarborough was especially livid following
Special Counsel Robert Hur’s finding that Biden is a “well-meaning, elderly man
with a poor memory,” accusing the special counsel of publishing a “bad-faith”
report. Scarborough bragged elsewhere that Biden “exercises every day,”
imploring viewers to “look [at] how fit and trim he is.”
If you can believe it, Scarborough’s co-host was somehow
worse, insisting even after the disastrous debate that Biden still had what it
would take to win the general election.
“[He’s] the man for this moment,” she declared,
addressing directly the “chorus of Biden doubters.”
“So many draw hope from his empathy and his ability to
have perspective, even right now, and to persevere when he is completely
counted out,” Brzezinski pleaded during what would end up being a 15-minute
segment defending Biden’s flailing presidency.
Amazing that Mika Brzezinski wasn’t able to turn the ship
around.
Elsewhere in the world of self-serving opportunists is
former Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who claims now that he had
an idea during debate prep with Biden last year that the president wasn’t
firing on all cylinders.
Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and
couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was,” Klain told author Chris Whipple
for the forthcoming book Uncharted. Klain also told Whipple he was “startled”
by Biden’s lack of focus, including when the then-president bailed on debate
prep to take a nap by the pool; Biden obsessed over foreign leaders, saying
“these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great
president”; he “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”;
and he “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.”
Klain had “never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of
it,” Whipple writes. “Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own
campaign.”
(In separate remarks to Politico, Klain did not dispute the accuracy of the
quotes.)
Yet, you may recall Klain was the one who said in July of
last year, after the debate and after voters had for years correctly
called out Biden’s obvious infirmities, that the “president is absolutely sharp, fit, on top of his game.”
He added during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (because
of course), “People can see that for themselves . . . sometimes presidents have
bad debates.”
Elsewhere, on CNN, Klain blamed a cold and overseas
travel for Biden’s debate implosion.
“I don’t deny that it was a bad debate performance;
that’s different than whether or not the president is up to the job,” Klain
said. “He’s clearly up to the job. He’s doing it every day. He’s doing it
successfully.”
Amazingly, considering what Klain claims now, he also
maintained during his 2024 appearance on CNN that Biden had “done well” in the
debate practices.
Speaking of CNN, let’s not forget anchor Jake Tapper, who
passed on covering what was then a national security threat for what now fits
more comfortably in the category of palace intrigue.
“Toni Morrison once said, ‘If there’s a book that you
want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,’” Tapper
said in a statement announcing the release of a book he co-authored with Axios’s
Alex Thompson. (Note: Alex Thompson deserves special recognition for his
reporting on this front. He has been unrelenting and consistent in covering
this story, which is more than can be said for his compatriot.) “That’s what
inspired this book: we wanted to know more about what we all just lived
through. More than 200 interviews later, Alex and I have a much better idea.
And soon you all will too.”
Biden’s debate performance was “not an anomaly,” the
authors explained, but “the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose
faculties had been diminishing for years.”
See, that’s an interesting thing to hear from Tapper
because, in 2020, after Lara Trump claimed Biden had displayed obvious signs of
“cognitive decline,” the CNN anchor was apoplectic, accusing her of “mocking
his stutter.”
“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel
when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper demanded. “I think you have
absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
Silly Lara Trump.
Didn’t she know you’re supposed to save that sort of
material for a book deal — and safely after the fact?
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