By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Our problem is not just that we are misgoverned, and our
problem is not just, as laid out in yesterday’s newsletter, that the top priorities of the
president and his cabinet are not the top priorities of a majority of the
electorate. (The president, further proving my point, yesterday: “I don’t care about
the midterms.”)
No, our problem is that a significant chunk of our
governing class is nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and in many
cases, they’re quite dumb. And they think the American people, collectively,
are dumb as well, and are easily fooled. This morning, we find that former
first lady Jill Biden, who had the option of just enjoying a quiet retirement
with her elderly husband, has instead chosen to emerge from private life to
relitigate the notion that Joe Biden was going senile, and/or too old to serve
another term.
Former first lady Jill Biden said
she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he
was having a stroke.
“I was frightened, because I had
never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News
Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.
“I don’t know what happened,” she
said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it
scared me to death.”
Bullcrap.
If you are genuinely concerned that the president of the
United States is having a stroke or other medical emergency, you interrupt the
debate. If the First Lady of the United States says, “stop the debate, I think
my husband is having a stroke,” the debate will stop. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash
were not going to insist that the president finish. The president travels with
a top-tier medical team. They will check him out thoroughly. (Note that for the
first time in history, the 90-minute debate featured two commercial breaks.)
We know that Jill Biden did not genuinely think that her
husband was having a stroke, because surely even a non-medical doctor like herself knows
that if someone is having a stroke, they need medical attention immediately. “With each moment that a
stroke goes untreated, the nervous tissue in the brain is rapidly and
irreversibly damaged. That is why it’s important to seek immediate medical
attention if you or someone you know begins to experience stroke symptoms.”
About one quarter of people who suffer a stroke die within one year.
When every second counts, you don’t keep the president
suffering an ongoing stroke up on the stage, waiting until the end of the
debate and hoping for the best.
What Jill Biden is unwittingly declaring in this
implausible nearly-two-years-late spin is, ‘I thought my husband was suffering
a medical emergency that risked permanent brain damage and possibly death, but
I concluded that finishing the debate was more important.”
The post-campaign books made clear that
former president Biden never finished one of his practice sessions. It is
genuinely an open question of whether, in the summer of 2024, Joe Biden could
still put together 90 consecutive minutes of sharp, attentive public
performance. As those books made clear:
By the end of 2022, Biden was
forgetting the names of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and
Communications Director Kate Bedingfield, and the president’s speechwriters had
adapted to a once infamously garrulous man who now found speaking a chore. “Everything
got shorter: speeches, paragraphs, even sentences. The vocabulary shrank . . .
they were slowly adapting to Biden’s shrinking capacities.”
By September 2023, Biden was at a
Manhattan fundraiser, telling the donors the exact same story twice in a span
of three minutes. That fall, he didn’t recognize DNC chairman Jaime Harrison,
and Virginia Senator Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that
the president had no idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy.
At a cabinet meeting that was likely the one held October 2, 2023, a cabinet
secretary described Biden as “disoriented” and “out of it,” mouth agape.
Jill Biden thinks she can convince you that Joe Biden
never looked as bad as he did on the debate stage before that night and never
looked as bad since. Her contention is that the single time that in 81 years
that Biden looked so utterly hapless, barely coherent, confused, and senile was
the one time he was in front of television cameras with the whole country
watching — an amazing coincidence. It’s the tired, “every time you can’t see
him, he’s doing cartwheels down the hall” spin.
Of course, after the debate, Jill Biden did not merely
insist that her husband was fine; she insisted he performed fine as well. “Joe,
you did such a great job! You answered every question!” she said,
in the tone of a kindergarten teacher addressing one of the slower kids in her
class. That does not sound like a woman terrified that her husband has just had
a stroke.
There is probably no one on earth who had more unfettered
access to Joe Biden in his unguarded moments during his presidency than Jill
Biden. No one had a clearer picture of his mental state, memory, physical
health, ability to focus, ability to enunciate and speak clearly, moods, and
overall capacity to perform his duties as president than the first lady. (If
you’re married, think about how well your spouse knows you compared to everyone
else in your life, particularly your co-workers.)
For what it’s worth, some unnamed former Biden
administration official is texting
reporters, saying “she’s lying.” I believe you, unnamed former Biden
administration official, but your argument would be way more powerful if you
would just come out and say so publicly.
And mark it down, because this is the rare day I
agree with former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray: “Jill
Biden expects the public to believe that Joe Biden had exactly one bad day
ever—debate night? These people have no respect for voters. If you don’t want
to answer real questions about your husband’s obvious cognitive decline, I get
it. Just don’t do a book tour.”
And that’s the
rub. Almost everyone in America is ready to leave the Biden presidency — a
failure on many levels — in the rearview mirror and focus on the copious
problems of the here and now. No one forced Jill Biden to write a memoir or
release it now. She doesn’t need the money. The Bidens have a net worth of about $10 million and own
two homes. Hachette purchased the rights to Biden’s presidential memoir for $10 million.
Someone out there is no doubt going to complain that Jill
Biden isn’t newsworthy anymore and today’s newsletter should cover something really important, like “Trump administration
officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money
to design a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait.”
But even after all this, Jill Biden wants to re-litigate
this argument. She was the architect of the giant failed effort to fool
Americans into believing that Joe Biden was sharp and healthy enough to serve
another four years as president. If you’re a Democrat, and you’re angry that
Donald Trump is serving his second term, Jill Biden has a heck of a lot to do
with how we ended up in this situation right now.
Starting next month, Jill Biden will be on an extensive book tour — New York,
Washington, Nashville, Philadelphia. The publication date for the book is June
2. As far as I can tell, no one has reviewed the book yet, and I have not seen
any early excerpts published in magazines. I suspect the audience for this book
— what is likely to amount to an insufferable pile of lame excuses, implausible
spin, blame-shifting and self-righteousness — is extremely limited. I am
reminded of the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Bill Clinton: No One Left to Lie To.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, a
House Democratic candidate in New Jersey, Adam Hamawy, volunteered in Bosnia
during the summer of 1994 with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the
“Benevolence International Foundation.”
Here’s what the U.S. Department of the Treasury had to
say about the “Benevolence International Foundation” back
in 2002:
Benevolence International
Foundation (BIF) is a U.S. tax-exempt not-for-profit organization whose stated
purpose is to conduct humanitarian relief projects throughout the world. BIF was incorporated in the State of Illinois
on March 30, 1992. Although BIF is incorporated in the United States, it
operates around the world, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Pakistan, China, Ingushetia,
Russia, and other nations. BIF operates
as Benevolence International Fund in Canada and as Bosanska Idealna Futura in
Bosnia.
Enaam Arnaout, BIF’s Chief
Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, recently was indicted
in the United States for operating BIF as a racketeering enterprise and
providing material support to organizations, including al Qaida, that are engaged
in violent activities.
Substantial evidence documents
the close relationship between Arnaout and Usama bin Laden, dating from the
mid-1980s. An article in the Arab News from 1988,
reporting on bin Laden’s activities at the al Masada mujahideen camp in
Afghanistan, included a photograph of Arnaout and bin Laden walking together. In a March 2002 search of BIF’s offices,
Bosnian law enforcement authorities discovered a host of evidence linking
Arnaout to bin Laden and al Qaida. Among
the files were scanned letters between Arnaout and bin Laden, under their
aliases.
In one handwritten letter, bin
Laden indicates that Arnaout is authorized to sign on bin Laden’s behalf.
Various documents also
established that Arnaout worked with others — including members of al Qaida —
to purchase rockets, mortars, rifles, and offensive and defensive bombs, and to
distribute them to various mujahideen camps, including camps operated by al
Qaida.
It remains unclear if Hamawy is promoting his candidacy
by touting his “firsthand expertise about Islamist terrorist groups.”
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