OPINION:
Here’s what we know now, 190 days after Americans went to the polls in November to cast their ballots for president: The press lied nonstop about President Biden’s mental acuity.
There are, of course, a couple of other options. Perhaps mainstream media members are incredibly stupid, or maybe they’re just utterly incompetent. There’s simply no other explanation for what they were telling us back then — when Mr. Biden was drifting off into space during his disastrous debate and falling up the Air Force One stairs — and what they’re telling us now (it’s worth pointing out that quite a few of them are getting paid hefty sums to finally come clean about what was going on).
The latest to cash in are two “journalists” — the woefully inadequate Jake Tapper of CNN and a guy named Alex Thompson, who works at someplace called Axios, a Greek word that means “worthy” but also the less superlative “suitable” (in his case, he is neither). They’ve penned a book titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
Here was their prime nugget of information that we all could have used years ago: Mr. Biden was so bad that at one point, some of his top aides floated the idea of getting the quickly descending president a wheelchair he could use if he were reelected as president. “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election,” one shocking section of the book reads, per Axios.
The book is based on more than 200 interviews, mostly with Democratic insiders, and most of whom would speak only if they could remain anonymous. Nearly all the interviews took place after the 2024 election was over (cuz, you know, why tell the American people all this juicy stuff before Election Day?).
The authors finally get around to telling us that Mr. Biden’s staffers were busy trying to find shorter walking paths to stages, adding handrails to any steps he might encounter and using a smaller staircase to board the presidential plane. Aides were suddenly deployed to walk along with the wobbly president across the White House lawn to block cameras — but also, the book says, to keep him from toppling over.
Mr. Biden also began forgetting names, staring blankly at people he had known for decades — he didn’t recognize actor George Clooney, the book says — and becoming more disoriented and incoherent when he got tired, which, at his age, was midday, every day.
Yet throughout the 2020 campaign, Mr. Tapper ran interference for the quickly deteriorating president. During one CNN interview, an indignant Mr. Tapper lectured then-Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump for questioning Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities, accusing her of “mocking his stutter” and saying she had “no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
“I would think that somebody in the family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar. Plenty of people have diagnosed your father from afar, and I’m sure it offends you,” he said. Ah, journalism.
But after the 2024 election, the media suddenly began to tell the truth (remember, they couldn’t say anything negative about Mr. Biden during the campaign because that would support President Trump, whom they had labeled as worse than Hitler). Always late, Mr. Tapper and Mr. Thompson finally arrived at the party.
Mr. Thompson made the saddest of all admissions during last month’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as he accepted yet another award for the liberal media, even though he failed to report on the true state of Mr. Biden’s mental acuity.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Mr. Thompson said. “But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of that. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better.”
You bear “some responsibility”? You bear all the responsibility. You did not do your job to tell the American people the truth. Instead, you saved all that until you could make bank writing a book.
Mr. Biden’s legacy will always be pathetic: He was a career politician and bloviating senator who was wrong on nearly every foreign policy idea he had, and then, when he was president, he hid his diminishing mental capabilities from the American people.
But for the media, it’s a generational betrayal of Americans’ trust. That won’t go away anytime soon. And it shouldn’t.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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