What a relief. For four years, the Democrats told half the country to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears. The media joined in, stigmatizing and slandering anyone who stated the obvious. Joe Biden was mentally and physically unfit for the presidency in 2020. He hid from the public for four years. The White House, the Democrats, and the media lied to the public when they insisted that he was fine. And they knew they were lying.
Biden’s disintegration in his debate with Donald Trump isn’t a scandal, so much as the moment at which the obvious can no longer be denied. The scandal is that Biden’s team, senior Democratic figures, and the media misled the public and made a joke of American democracy for four years. And they are still doing it.
It so happens that the Biden-Trump debate occurred unusually early in the election season — right in the sweet spot between the closure of the Democratic primaries on June 8 and the opening of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. Having forestalled an open primary, the Democrats can now preempt a contested convention. The same media that covered for Biden’s debility, called Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” and continue to show a weird lack of interest in the origins of COVID-19 are now covering for the Democrats while the party’s minions clean up the Biden mess and its bigwigs bicker over his successor.
I say “the media,” but not everyone went along with the lie. I called Biden “senile” before he took office. On his Inauguration Day, I congratulated “President Harris” as the inevitable and disastrous future. In August 2021, after the fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, I wrote that Biden was “unfit to be the President of the United States,” that it was “obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job,” and that the “part-time president” was visibly worsening and should resign.
This took no vision or courage. I was an immigrant and historian writing for a British outlet, so I wasn’t part of the incestuous club of East Coast political journalism. I had nothing to lose by going against the tide, and much to gain. Nor were these novel insights. The whole world, the Democrats and the media excepted, always saw President Joe Biden this way. America’s allies were relieved that Trump was out, but they saw perfectly well that the purported leader of the free world was a corrupt dotard. America’s enemies saw it the same way. See: Afghanistan, Ukraine, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranian nuclear program, and the Taiwan Strait. And also the southern border.
I mention all this not just to disassociate myself from the 80% of American journalists who are little more than Democratic publicists, but also because the media cover-up will be part of the political cleanup. The attack on American democracy can no longer be denied, so its backers are falling back on minimizing the crime and explaining away the motives. Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine on July 2, reckons that Biden’s team began with a “small, containable problem.” They had “good and noble reasons” to contain it by “managing the president’s schedule and public profile.” The problem worsened their “predicament.” It was “too late to come clean,” so they “redoubled their denial.” They are now “desperate and playing for time.”
A case can be made for Plato’s “noble lie” in wartime, as in the patriotic fraud of keeping FDR’s wheelchair and illness out of the papers. There is nothing “good and noble” about misleading the public in a peacetime election and presidency — and we are, despite the Biden administration’s best efforts, still in peacetime or thereabouts. FDR had to fight Hitler and Hirohito. JFK and Reagan had to contain the Soviets. Biden was charged with keeping out Trump. If you think that is also the war of “democracy versus autocracy,” you have Biden brain.
If Biden wasn’t running the country, who was? Conservatives with their heads wedged in the rabbit hole of conspiracy imagine Barack Obama running a remote-controlled White House from his basement. This is too literal and too quaint. The modern presidency resembles a monarchy only in its ceremonial form. Its content is bureaucratic. If the buck could still stop at Truman’s desk, it was because FDR’s expansion of the bureaucracy was only the beginning. It was still possible then to speak of American democracy without sighing.
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Today, the buck never nears the Resolute desk. Our bureaucracies, like the French nobility before 1789, are resolute only in guarding their privileges and dodging the pitchforks. In order for things to stay the same, nothing must change. The incompetence of Biden appointees such as Janet Yellen, Mayor Pete, and Antony Blinken isn’t an accident. It’s impotence by design, like Biden’s placeholder presidency, or putting Kamala Harris on the ticket in 2020 and trying to ditch her now.
The presidency’s function is now symbolic: an allegedly noble fiction. The Biden plot was preceded by the West Wing plotline in which President Bartlet hides his MS from the public. The reality is tragedy replaying as farce: an endless rerun where no one can walk and talk at the same time, and no one really wants to fix it. The liberals are illiberal. The Democrats are undemocratic. Do the Republicans really want to save the republic?
