On the menu today: A headline in Politico this morning reads, “Biden is AWOL as Washington spirals into shutdown chaos; Democratic lawmakers haven’t heard from the president.”
The government shuts down at midnight, and the only thing on Joe Biden’s schedule is a visit to Children’s National Hospital in Washington. The spending fight centers around the maneuvering of House speaker Mike Johnson, President-elect Donald Trump, the House Freedom Caucus, the Senate, “First Buddy” Elon Musk — nobody’s even asking, “What does Biden think?” We’ve all just accepted that Biden isn’t really running his own White House, that he’s now just a mumbling geriatric who communicates to the country through issued statements, like an announcement that he’s commuted the sentence of “non-violent offenders” that included a Maryland woman dubbed the “Black Widow” for murdering two husbands and a boyfriend for insurance money. (I guess they were non-violent murders.) You can make a strong argument that the ongoing effort to (poorly) hide the president’s senility is the biggest, worst, and most consequential presidential scandal of all time. After all, Edith Wilson only ran the executive branch for about a year and a half.
Our Absent President
You knew that Joe Biden was in rough shape. We predicted that after Biden left office someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa would reveal in some book, something along the lines of, “The president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.”
But the exposés didn’t even wait for Biden to leave office. And it’s easy to see Thursday morning’s 3,800 word report in the Wall Street Journal as just another edition of “Joe Biden was senile, and his staff tried to hide it.”
But it’s the details that really illuminate how, as Jeff Blehar wrote in one of his two blisteringly hot essays about this, “For four years, we have had a ghost as a president.”
The first and most important detail is that Biden was in rough shape from the start of his presidency, or at least by spring of 2021. That the “bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on — in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”
If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days and today was a bad day, so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.
Got that? The American president was too tired and too unable to focus to have meetings with national-security officials some days.
The Journal report describes how Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams “would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.”
You and I saw Biden wandering, seemingly lost as he finished his remarks or returned to the White House. If that happened to your grandfather, you’d be worried.
“Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president.” As I started ranting and raving yesterday, if you can’t handle receiving bad news, you can’t handle the presidency. That’s pretty much what the job is, day after day.
“The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.” No wonder he thought he was doing fine.
“Defense Secretary [Lloyd] Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people familiar with the relationship said.” Then again, Austin disappeared for stretches himself.
“At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.”
For Biden’s testimony to special counsel Robert Hur, “The prep sessions took about three hours a day for about a week ahead of the interview, according to a person familiar with the preparation. During these sessions, Biden’s energy levels were up and down. He couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him, the person said.”
Never mind remembering prepared lines; for the past four years, how much has Biden remembered from his daily intelligence briefings?
I’ve given Chris Cillizza a lot of grief over his 2021 CNN article that accused me and other Republicans of trafficking in the “gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life” for daring to suggest that, as I put it, “something is wrong with the president,” demonstrated by Biden’s extremely limited appearances in public during the Afghanistan-withdrawal crisis.
In the meanest thing I can possibly do to Cillizza, I am going to quote him at length, from his explanation posted online on Thursday:
As a reporter, I have a confession to make: I should have pushed harder, earlier for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline. So let me explain. Joe Biden was president from 2020 to 2024.
First, do you notice he’s talking about Biden in past tense?
Second, Biden was inaugurated January 20, 2021, and, barring his death or impeachment and removal, will remain president until January 20, 2025.
I worked at CNN through 2022. During that time, the early part when I was at CNN, people, Republicans, would regularly ping me and say, “why don’t you ask more questions about Joe Biden and how he’s doing? He’s 76, 77, 78-year-old man.”
(Biden was 78 on Inauguration Day 2021.)
And I would sort of brush them off. What I would say is, “well, there’s no obvious evidence he’s in decline. Yeah, he moves a little slower, he talks a little slower, but there’s no evidence he’s declining. And the White House, and the people around Joe Biden, were absolutely adamant that suggesting anything, asking the question, about whether he was in some physical, mental, or both decline, was offensive. (mimicking) ‘How could you? It’s age shaming!” And I think that impacted me at some level. Because while I did ask the question from time to time — you know, not directly to the White House, but aides and people in that orbit, I didn’t really push on it, if I’m being honest.
Now, once I left CNN and once it became a little bit more clear to me about Biden’s age, I think I did write pretty regularly and talk pretty regularly about how I wasn’t sure that this guy was up to it. And then obviously after the June 27th debate everybody including me was writing and talking about it.
Hey, all it took for the president’s age to become a legitimate cause for concern in certain corners of the media world was for him to go up on a debate stage and in a blank-eyed, slack-jawed mumble, lament, “We have a thousand trillionaires in America,” and express hopes about what America can do “if we finally beat Medicare.”
Now, I know it’s going to shock some of you, but it is conceivable that “the White House, and the people around Joe Biden” were not going to be perfectly honest with the public about the state of the president’s physical and mental health. And it’s just maybe possible that some of those furious “how could you? It’s age shaming!” tirades were designed to get people like Chris Cillizza to stop asking those questions.
I think if you’re a reporter, you must be willing to run the risk of irking government officials by asking questions they don’t like hearing. Their emotional health does not get to set the boundaries of what you cover.
Think about how many layers of safeguards failed here.
First, a person who wants to be president should recognize his age and physical health, and the likelihood that aging in future years will interfere with his ability to do his duties. Then it’s on the candidate’s family to be realistic with him, not to see him as a cash cow and a Pez dispenser for sweeping pardons. Then it’s on the longtime friends and circle of advisers to be blunt, to say the things that the candidate’s loved ones might find hard to say. “Yeah, you might feel okay now, but how about in a year or two years from now? If you start to forget things or struggle, forget the consequences to you, what are the consequences for the country?”
Failure, failure, failure.
Then it’s on the media to ask the hard questions, and on the candidate’s party to have realistic expectations about a late-septuagenarian-turning-early-octogenarian’s ability to handle one of the most challenging jobs in the world.
In the case of Biden, every now and then, someone in the Democratic Party would point out his age. In 2019, his Democratic presidential-primary rival Julian Castro asked Biden if he was forgetting what he said two minutes ago, and for this Castro was effectively cast into the Phantom Zone. (I’ve been making this joke for a while, and someone wrote in that Castro is now a weekend guest host on MSNBC. Folks, 6 p.m. on weekends on MSNBC is the Phantom Zone. Everyone else in America is watching college football.) Then it’s on the president’s cabinet to watch carefully to see if an aging president can still handle his duties. The 25th Amendment is in the U.S. Constitution for a reason.
Failure, failure, failure.
You can argue that the American people failed as part of this system too, as they shrugged off concerns about Biden’s age in 2020. But a large swath of public, fairly early on, concluded Biden was too old for a second term. By August 2023, about three quarters of the public thought Joe Biden was too old to effectively serve as president.
Today is December 20, 2024. Joe Biden is still our commander in chief for one month.
ADDENDUM:
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