Unless Joe Biden de-ages 20 years and shakes the mental
issues that have latched onto him like barnacles, we’re bound to read
more stories about his rapid decrepitude. We’ve known for years that Joe
Biden is cooked. The liberal media finally can’t defend him anymore,
lest they look like reporters from North Korea. Olivia Nuzzi at New York
Magazine penned a damning and brutal piece about Joe Biden’s state of
decline, which includes the president forgetting the names of longtime
friends. Others who get access to these swanky events told Nuzzi that
they might be unable to vote for Biden in 2024 because they don’t know
if he’s in charge.
While anonymously sourced, Nuzzi spoke with scores of Democrats and
friends of the family that painted a brutal picture of the president
whom members of his party currently besiege to drop out following that
June 27 debate performance where Trump obliterated him. The first part
of her piece outlines the elaborate and, at times, over-the-top
protocols the Biden team puts in place to prevent gaffes. Nuzzi added
that there were fundraisers where staffers tasked with keeping Biden
from humiliating himself were a significant proportion of the attendees
(via NYMag) [emphasis mine]:
When
they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard,
they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were
also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record).
They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were
bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know
things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that
things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine.
They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the
future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible
personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed
innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he
seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening
cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving
sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a
simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their
own: “Have you seen him?!”
Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime
friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of
anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember
their names. At a White House event last year, a guest
recalled, with horror, realizing that the president would not be able to
stay for the reception because, it was clear, he would not be able to
make it through the reception. The guest wasn’t sure they could
vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had
previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not
really be the acting president after all.
Others told me the
president was becoming increasingly hard to get ahold of, even as it
related to official government business, the type of things any U.S.
president would communicate about on a regular basis with high-level
officials across the world. Biden instead was cocooned within mounting
layers of bureaucracy, spoken for more than he was speaking or spoken
to.
Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family
friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and
nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s
ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them
for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words
his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s
gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much
worse!”
Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But
surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since
surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at
cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle
America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the
nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most
rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump.
Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024:
There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who
control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace
Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense.
They were in full agreement.
The initial spin on that from Biden and his campaign was that Trump
had a bad night, as evidenced by the national polling, which didn’t
move. That changed within 36 hours of the debate. First, Biden was
trailing Trump in key battleground states pre-debate. He was down almost
four points in Michigan, a must-win state. OpenLabs, a progressive
polling firm, painted an even worse picture,
showing a massive drop across the board in these battleground states,
with supposedly blue states becoming redder. Forty percent of Biden’s
2020 supporters felt he needed to drop out.
Trump had a bad night, Joe? I think that’s your declining mental facilities showing again.
No comments:
Post a Comment