Verifying what anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past four years had already suspected, a bombshell article in The Wall Street Journal says President Joe Biden’s staff spent his entire presidency covering up the fact that the man America elected was in no shape to do the job.
Which makes us ask, along with DailyMail.com commentator Maureen Callahan, “Just who has been running the country for the past four years?”
Americans, radio/TV host John Cardillo, said, “have a right to know.”
“The hidden, more important question,” conservative commentator Charlie Kirk asked, is “Why wasn’t this a story already? How many journalists joined in a conspiracy of silence to trick America into re-electing a senile old man?”
The WSJ exposé, based on interviews with some 50 people close to power, reveals a White House where aides and handlers managed the ailing president’s commitments—and his physical movements—to compensate for his deficiencies.
Between carefully scheduling meetings and appearances—to make sure they didn’t interfere with the naps of the most powerful man in the world—and simply blocking access to him for the very people who needed his direction, White House insiders effectively concealed his mental and intellectual decline from public view.
Because Biden took office during COVID, his advanced age (78 years and 61 days on inauguration day) provided his handlers with a convenient excuse for keeping him away from the madding crowds, so as not to expose him to the virus. But they already knew.
During the 2020 election campaign, WSJ reports, Jill Biden’s press secretary Michael La Rosa bragged to a reporter that Mrs. Biden had held more events than her husband, the candidate. A deputy campaign manager then pressured La Rosa to get back in touch with the reporter and downplay the difference in stamina between the two Bidens, saying “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad.”
That’s 2020. During the election campaign. Meaning that already before the 2020 election, the people around Biden—including, and especially, wife Jill—were very much aware of his declining capacity. And yet, they soldiered on to get him—or themselves—to the White House.
And it got worse. Special counsel Robert Hur, who early this year investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, recommended against prosecution despite uncovering evidence that the president “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” Why? Hur wrote:
[A]t trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.
Not qualified to stand trial—but still qualified to be in charge of the United States? According to his press secretary, absolutely.
That it took till the disastrous June 27th debate with Trump for Biden’s handlers to realize their gaslighting of the American people wasn’t working says a lot about their disdain for the public. And, for that matter, for Joe Biden.
In his four years as president, Biden only held nine meetings with his full cabinet. (Trump and Obama, during the first year of their presidencies alone, held 25 and 19, respectively.)
Cabinet members like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen were with increasing frequency prevented from direct interaction with the commander in chief, WSJ writes. Members of Congress were also hindered from conversations with the leader of the free world, including before and during the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan where 13 American servicemen were killed.
White House officials like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, National Economic Council head Lael Brainard, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken took meetings and phone calls that the president, under normal circumstances, would have handled.
Press conferences were rare, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre assured the press corps that there was no cover-up of any cognitive problem on the part of the president, that his physicians had determined he did not need a cognitive test, and that his mental acuity was not an issue. In a press briefing in July, Biden’s press flak told the media:
He is as sharp as ever, as I have known him to be.
In my engagement and my experience with him, I know, when I walk into the Oval Office or, or see him on Air Force One, I have to be on top of my game. I do.
Not that this affected the watchdogs-turned-lapdogs in the establishment media. MSNBC (or, as Trump refers to the outlet, “MSDNC”—as in Democratic National Committee) talking head Joe Scarborough in March of this year said Biden was “far beyond cogent; in fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been.”
In June, the WSJ was taken to the woodshed by the rest of the mainstream media for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Biden wasn’t quite the intellectual superman they had made him out to be.
Sources WSJ spoke to said aides were told not to bring Biden press clippings of negative stories. During the 2024 election campaign, his pollsters weren’t allowed to meet with him, so only God and the (unrelated) closest White House staffers knew what information the president was actually in possession of when he got angry at Democratic lawmakers who, in a call on July 13th—a Saturday—questioned his statement that he was doing fine in election polls. (That call, the paper says, was ended when Biden “looked up and abruptly told the group he had to go to church.”)
Even The New York Times political reporters who covered and traveled with Biden during his presidency said in a—generally laudatory—article on December 17th that “it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years” and that “the president actually occupying the White House has become a national afterthought.”
So who really authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-provided long-range missiles inside Russia? Who pardoned a Chinese child porn convict? Who mandated COVID vaccination for military personnel on penalty of discharge? To only mention a few of the countless orders to come out of a White House definitely not run by the president. Most likely, we’ll never know.
As even left-wing progressive commentator Cenk Uygur said: “his own staffers admitted to WSJ they thought he was in decline the minute he stepped into office. Remember their lies next time establishment Dems tell you they know best.”
