The New York Times finally joined the rest of the world in acknowledging one thing: Joe Biden is mentally deficient and has been for years.
Since day one, Joe has exhibited signs of mental decrepitude, which led
to a tight inner circle controlling the events surrounding the
president to keep him on track and looking publicly vibrant for as long
as possible. Jill Biden was part of this cabal, which the Times fleshed
out in a lengthy article that would have been excoriated last summer for
being out of line and borderline fake news because Joe Biden was fit,
mentally sharp, and ready for a second term. The CNN debate last June
obliterated that narrative.
The perception of Joe being too old always seems at the back of
everyone’s mind. As the 2024 cycle approached, even his top aides did
little things to obscure the mental and physical limitations. They
surrounded him with aides when walking to Marine One in a vain attempt
to cover the unusual gait he acquired for not wearing a boot for
fracturing his foot before his inauguration in 2020. It left him with
that noticeable gait that reeks of ‘old man.’ The travel drained Joe
during the D-Day commemoration, where even French officials commented
that the president looked like he was in a fog or out of it.
Preparing
for the debate, which would be an election-killing moment for Biden,
included naptime. The publication described the months leading up to the
thick of the 2024 election cycle as serially bad, an inescapable storm
of bad press which, in retrospect, we all saw coming when he fell off a
bike while vacationing in Delaware and tripping over a sandbag at the US
Air Force Academy’s commencement. As for money for the war chest, it’s
hard to convince the fat cats of the Democratic Party when you ramble
and increase fears among the donor base that you’re not up for the job,
despite whatever Jill Biden, aka Lady MacBeth, and her minions say. Joe
needed a teleprompter for even small donor gatherings, which unnerved
many. It’s almost as if the Times knew this already, or at least could
have done this more than 18 months ago but didn’t for obvious political
reasons. Better late than never? I don’t know—Biden can’t remember some
executive orders he supposedly signed. So, who’s been running the
country (via NYT) [emphasis mine]:
Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump heads back to the
White House, demoralized Democrats debate what might have been had the
president bowed out in time to let a younger generation run. Mr. Biden,
82, has at the same time made the extraordinary admission that he might
not have made it through a second term. “Who knows what I’m going to be
when I’m 86 years old?” he said in an interview with USA Today on Jan.
5.
The president’s acknowledgment has put a new spotlight on his
family and inner circle, all of whom dismissed concerns from voters and
Mr. Biden’s own party that he was too old for the job. And yet they
recognized his physical frailty to a greater degree than they have
publicly acknowledged. Then they cooperated, according to interviews
with more than two dozen aides, allies, lawmakers and donors, to manage
his decline.
They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was
in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how
aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing
information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated
the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked
from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South
Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.
They
had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private
homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand.
They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to
board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly
of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of
the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing
social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that
pushed back on negative articles and polls.
Mr. Biden’s fumbles
continued this week. In announcing a cease-fire deal between Israel and
Hamas on Wednesday he confused the emir of Kuwait with the emir of Qatar
and said Hezbollah rather than Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7
attack on Israel. He also referred to his national security adviser as
“Secretary Jake Sullivan” before catching himself.
Six key people protected the president.
Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. [Mike] Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule.
[…]
The
president made so many rambling remarks at other fund-raisers over the
summer that several supporters called his advisers to plead for him to
be more focused and on message. Others who saw Mr. Biden thought the
wear and tear of the presidency was taking its toll.
[…]
At
a meeting with potential donors in Boston in the summer of 2022, the
first lady heard directly from Joshua Bekenstein, the chairman of Bain
Capital. In an episode reported earlier by NBC, Mr. Bekenstein praised
Mr. Biden’s leadership, and said he could leave public life proud of a
one-term legacy.
What happened next is not widely known. Mr.
Bekenstein went on to say that if Mr. Biden was not running again, he
should announce it to give other Democrats time to get in the race,
according to two people briefed on the conversation. Mr. Bekenstein had
been under the impression that Mr. Biden had promised to be a one-term
candidate.
The paper later revealed that Mr. Bekenstein’s one-term remarks
shocked Biden officials. But the part they buried, of course, was the
‘Biden is mentally astute behind closed doors,’ which they had to
mention at the end in the section relating to Biden’s activities after
his July announcement, where he formally withdrew from the race:
Mr. Biden’s allies said he remained sharp in private situations.
Roger
Harrison, who was Mr. Biden’s deputy chief of staff when he was a
senator in the 1970s and has remained a close friend, visited him at the
White House in September, shortly after he had dropped out of the
race.
“I’m sitting at the desk with him,” Mr. Harrison recalled.
“His staff brought in a speech on gun violence that he was going to
deliver in the East Room that afternoon. So he goes through the speech,
and he has a pen, and he goes line by line, page by page, marking it up.
We then went to a meeting with his staff, and he told them what changes
he wanted to make. It was like I was back in the Senate, when I would
hand him a speech. His procedure was no different than what I saw 30
years ago, 40 years ago.”
At the same time, Mr. Harrison said, he noticed “cosmetic changes” in how the president walked and spoke.
“I
used to tell him, ‘You know, you have a great voice. It’s smooth. It’s
clear. You have a voice like Ronald Reagan. That’s one of your
attributes,’” Mr. Harrison said. “Sadly, it’s noticeably less. But you
know the old adage: Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
No, we can judge, and we did—by electing Donald J. Trump the 47th president of the United States.
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