Joe Biden could have used the disturbing findings in Robert Hur’s report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents and his demeanor during interviews with the special counsel to his advantage. He and his allies could have only emphasized the material distinctions between his conduct and Donald Trump’s, which framed the president as less evasive and obstructive than his likely Republican opponent. He might have brushed off the observations about his mental decline and used the low expectations for his performance they set to vault off them during his forthcoming State of the Union address. Given Hur’s apparently low estimation of Biden’s faculties, it wouldn’t have been difficult to surpass them. But Biden didn’t do any of this.
Rather, the report set off a flurry of presidential activity that is highly unusual for the president. He delivered not one but two public addresses in its wake, even going so far as to take reporters’ questions well past the point at which Biden prefers to retire. The goal was clearly to communicate Biden’s vivacity, but the effect was the opposite. In a primetime address to the nation, Biden chose to present his most cantankerous face — all while doing little to dispel the notion that his cognitive acuity is in decline.
He confused Mexico and Egypt. He barked at the reporters who questioned his abilities (“That’s your judgment! That is not the judgment of the press!” he exclaimed to a member of the press). Then, in a bizarre and unnecessary digression, Biden issued gratuitous condemnations of Israel’s conduct in its defensive war in Gaza and inadvisably revealed his desire to seek an indefinite cease-fire in the region by convincing Israel to consent to a short-term cessation of hostilities he would attempt to extend — an admission that all but forecloses on that outcome.
Biden’s conduct since the Hur report has done little more than convey in no uncertain terms how devastating its conclusions are to the president’s political fortunes. If this impartial assessment of Biden’s decline from his own Justice Department could have been rebutted, it cannot be now. Biden might have set out to convince the nation that Hur’s conclusions regarding the president’s affable decrepitude were wrong. In the process, he only managed to refute the affable part.