For years, the media told Americans not to believe their lying eyes about Joe Biden’s condition. Now those same “guardians of democracy” are suddenly convinced that there’s something wrong with President Donald Trump when we all can see that there isn’t. It’s sad, deceitful, and predictable.
As you know, Trump’s recent absence from the public eye over Labor Day weekend ignited a wildfire of speculation from the left, including insinuations from media figures like Jen Psaki that he might be concealing health issues.
Psaki steeped her claim that “We may never know why Donald Trump suddenly spent a week hiding entirely from the American public” in insinuation, suggesting a cover-up without any real evidence. This sudden scrutiny on Trump’s health is all too predictable when we view it through the prism of how the legacy media treated Biden’s far more visible and undeniable health decline.
Glaring signs of decline marked Biden’s presidency, from incoherent ramblings and blank stares to awkward meanderings onstage and repeated gaffes suggesting serious cognitive struggles. The media’s response? Virtually no meaningful accountability.
Biden spent nearly 40% of his presidency away from the White House, often retreating to his Delaware beach home or Camp David, and routinely avoided press conferences, opting instead for scripted appearances that couldn’t mask his faltering faculties. When Biden did face the press, his performances were disastrous by any objective standard, yet the establishment media chose silence or euphemisms over scrutiny.
The Biden White House’s cover-up likely extended beyond mental fog to serious physical health issues—Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis, for example, only came to light after his presidency ended. The media’s eager embrace of every unsubstantiated whisper about Trump’s health, juxtaposed with its protective wall around Biden, tells the story of a deeply politicized press.
Months ago, the media began to pivot away from Biden’s health cover-up and instead weaponized the conversation around Trump. The book Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson isn’t an honest reckoning with journalistic failure but a strategy to ramp up focus on Trump’s health while glossing over Biden’s. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Tapper himself called for the media to be more aggressive in demanding presidential health transparency, but he conspicuously aimed this call at Trump, not Biden.
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“Original Sin was never about having a time of true introspection surrounding the press' role in willfully covering up Biden's dangerous decline,” I wrote back in May. “It’s a carefully crafted excuse to turn the spotlight back onto Trump and justify ramping up scrutiny of his health.”
Tapper made this abundantly clear during an interview with Wolf Blitzer when he told him, “I think that the press corps, and certainly including myself, needs to worry less about politeness when it comes to these health issues, and needs to be even more aggressive when it comes to demanding transparency on health issues when it comes to the president.”
“President Trump, while he appears healthy, he has not been transparent about his health records," Tapper added without evidence. "And I think that that’s something that the American people have a right to.”
In other words, Biden hid the truth about his health, but the only way to make up for it is to question Trump’s health at every turn aggressively. Trump’s brief absence from the media cameras was such a moment.
The lesson here is unmistakable: the press was never interested in holding Biden accountable. Its plan was always to pivot the narrative, to take whatever cracks appeared in Trump’s routine and blow them up into a scandal while whitewashing the far more serious issues of Biden’s presidency. Trump’s short absence over Labor Day weekend wasn’t just fodder for speculation; it was an opportunity the media had been quietly preparing for all along. This is a calculated campaign to rewrite the rules of scrutiny in real time, to make Trump the story and distract from the sins of the past when it came to covering up Biden’s health.
