President Joe Biden listens during a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House in Washington, on July 3, posthumously honoring two U.S. Army privates who were part of a daring Union Army contingent that stole a Confederate train during the Civil War.Susan Walsh/The Associated Press
In the months leading up to last week’s watershed presidential debate, the White House angrily pushed back against any suggestion that Joe Biden’s declining cognitive fitness was interfering with his ability to perform the toughest and most important job in the world.
In March, when the special counsel investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents after he stepped down as vice-president described him as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” Democrats circled the wagons and attacked the messenger. The special counsel, they countered, was a registered Republican.
When The Wall Street Journal last month published a long article that documented a series of behind-closed-doors meetings in which participants said Mr. Biden often stumbled over his words, got names and facts wrong or appeared to tune out, the blowback from the White House was brutal and dismissive.
Democrats accused the Journal of propagating a false Republican narrative about the 81-year-old Mr. Biden and not paying the same amount of attention to the age (78) and mental acuity of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump. But we now know that the Democrats were either in denial or complicit in a deceitful cover-up.
The lid has now been blown off this scandal. Could the timing be any worse, with only four months to go until the election and with Mr. Trump riding a wave of good news? A Supreme Court decision this week on presidential immunity could deal a fatal blow to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Mr. Biden’s terrifyingly wobbly debate performance was agonizing to watch. It laid bare for the entire planet what most of Washington has been whispering about for months – that the world’s most powerful man is a shadow of his former self, struggling to string his sentences together and sounding at times as incoherent as Grampa Simpson.
In the aftermath of the debate, the White House has nevertheless tried to pass off his performance as a one-off. As the disaster was unfolding in real-time, Democratic aides said that Mr. Biden had a cold. Later, they tried to spin the narrative that he was simply worn down by a punishing travel schedule that had taken him to Europe twice in the past month, first to join in D-Day commemorations in France, then to the G7 summit in Italy. Neither of those excuses flew.
“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, wrote on X on debate night.
The next day, The New York Times, which just a week earlier had published an article defending Mr. Biden against “misleading” Republican videos that claimed to depict Mr. Biden’s apparent mental lapses during his recent European trips, came out with a scathing editorial calling on Mr. Biden to step down in favour of a new Democratic nominee to take on Mr. Trump.
“As it stands, the President is engaged in a reckless gamble,” the Times editorial board said. “It’s too big of a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.”
Even after this, the Biden campaign sent out a fundraising email on the weekend that claimed the media had ignored the President’s bouncy post-debate appearances because they were “busy hyperventilating and trying to manifest drama to boost ratings.”
Well, anyone who cares about democracy and the future of the free world should be hyperventilating right now. The prospect of a Trump “revenge” presidency, facilitated by the Supreme Court’s removal of limits on executive power, is very real. And Democrats are still debating whether they should push Mr. Biden out the door before it is too late.
On Wednesday, the Times reported that Mr. Biden has privately acknowledged that he may not be able to salvage his candidacy. “Absolutely false,” the White House riposted.
Mr. Biden has been underestimated so many times in his five-decade-long political career that it may be tempting for his staunchest supporters to think this time is no different. But it is. Democrats have six weeks to organize an open convention before they meet in late August to officially choose their party’s presidential nominee. The circumstances are less than ideal and there is no clear alternative to Mr. Biden who has the name recognition, favourability rating and experience to avoid what might be a nasty nomination race.
Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for this mess. Most of them have long known that Mr. Biden was tempting fate by seeking a second term. That might not have mattered if only his career was on the line. We all know that is not the case.