Don’t Forget the Lessons of Biden’s Health Cover-Up

H as Joe Biden been a Potemkin president these last few months?

House speaker Mike Johnson told the Free Press on Friday that Biden was completely unaware of an executive order he had signed to place a moratorium on exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) to our allies. The move heightened Europe’s dependency on natural gas from Vladimir Putin’s Russia and hurt the economies of several energy-producing U.S. states.

Johnson said that after being put off by White House staff for nine weeks, he was finally able to get a meeting with the president in January 2024. When he arrived, Johnson says, he was “ambushed” by Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries, who wanted him to back more funding for Ukraine.

Biden, who apparently didn’t know what was going on, asked the others to leave so he could meet privately with Johnson. When asked by the House speaker about the LNG export pause, the president told Johnson that he had not signed such an executive order. When pressed, he insisted that he had only requested a study of the issue — not a moratorium.

“It occurred to me he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed. I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble.'” Johnson recalled.

Biden has continued his seemingly erratic behavior. One of the strangest announcements this month was his declaration that the unratified Equal Rights Amendment was part of the Constitution and “the law of the land.” Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan had said in mid-December that adding the ERA to the Constitution would be against “established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”

Who knows if Biden — or First Lady Jill Biden, or some activist running the president’s social media account — actually made the decision to declare the ERA “the law of the land”?

Megan McArdle, a columnist for the Washington Post, says that the media’s role in obscuring Biden’s cognitive decline is the biggest scandal of the year, especially as the media establishment “prides itself on ‘speaking truth to power.’” The few outlets that challenged the White House’s cover-up became the targets of an intimidation campaign. In March of last year, after the Wall Street Journal published a 3,000-word article investigating Biden’s slipping mental acuity, the White House sent out nine responses blasting the piece as a “complete and utter editorial fail.” Also in March, MSNBC Biden-booster Joe Scarborough said that “this version of Biden, intellectually and analytically, is the best Biden ever.” Compelling video evidence of Biden’s frailty was denounced as “cheap fakes.”

The same type of attack was mounted by the media last April, after the Department of Justice’s special counsel, Robert Hur, reportedly “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified material . . . when he was a private citizen.” Hur declined to recommend prosecution, reasoning that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Although it ignored the media’s role in the scandal, the New York Times finally broke cover last week with an account of how Biden’s staff canceled meetings on his “bad days,” delayed sharing information with him, had him use a teleprompter for even small events, and deluged him with positive media pieces that declared his age wasn’t an issue with voters.

The American people were owed the truth. If Biden himself hadn’t so visibly broken the story of his mental and physical decline during his only debate with Donald Trump, last June, the cover-up would have continued.

There’s a long history of presidential aides lying about and obfuscating their boss’s health, in no small part because their power rests on his staying in office. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, a leader’s inner circle believes he is so precious that he must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.

After Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in 1919, for example, his wife Edith practically ran the government behind the scenes for a year and a half. Chris Cox, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has written a new biography of Wilson that sheds light on just how impaired he was and how little the nation knew about it. “He has been ill since last October,” Wilson’s press secretary at Versailles, Ray Stannard Baker, recorded in his diary in late January 1920, “and he cannot know what is going on. He sees almost nobody and hears almost no direct news. . . . Was there ever such a situation in our history!” Though he had improved somewhat by the summer of 1920, Wilson was able to concentrate only for short periods and watched movies every day. The few friends who saw him knew not to discuss business. Ike Hoover, chief usher of the White House, who brought Wilson to the cabinet room in his wheelchair, would watch as the president sat silently for the “so-called” meetings “as one in a trance.”

Take a more recent example: On any given day in office, John F. Kennedy was using up to twelve painkillers and medications that brought on a myriad of side effects. His Addison’s disease was carefully hidden from the public, and some doctors believed he wouldn’t have survived a second term.

But the most egregious cover-up involved Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hid from the public the fact that he was dying in the election year of 1944. In January, naval doctor Ross McIntire, the president’s personal physician for twelve years, told reporters that FDR’s health was the best it had been since he had started examining him. Several days later, Dr. McIntire was promoted to rear admiral. In March, McIntire diagnosed FDR with acute congestive heart failure and, in July, told him he probably wouldn’t finish a fourth term if he won it. A day later, Roosevelt announced that he would run for reelection. In October, McIntire assured the press that FDR had “absolutely no organic difficulties at all.”

With such assurances and a few carefully staged appearances, Roosevelt won. In January 1945, a dying, drugged-up FDR left for a fateful summit with Stalin and Churchill in Yalta. In a letter, Roosevelt described his negotiating strategy to his friend William Bullitt: “I think that if I give (Stalin) everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, . . . he will not try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” We know how that turned out — Stalin reneged on all his commitments, and 120 million Eastern Europeans were condemned to live under Communism for more than 40 years. World War II historian Lynne Olson, writing in the New York Times, concludes that “Roosevelt’s cover-up of his failing health in the 1944 campaign was an egregious deception of American voters and helped contribute to a climate of cynicism about politicians.”

Sadly, one of Joe Biden’s enduring legacies will be the deepening of that cynicism. We will learn more about the cover-up of Biden’s health in the coming weeks and months. We may get answers about how, in February, Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s personal physician, could issue a summary declaring him physically fit for duty. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre admitted at the time that O’Connor had not given Biden any cognitive exam: “He passes a cognitive test every day,” she claimed.

We must learn from history and refuse to accept at face value similar assurances from any White House. The Biden cover-up will contribute to a diminution of trust in the White House that will affect all future presidents. What a sad legacy for a man who claimed that he wanted to conduct his administration with full transparency and restore confidence in government.