We're only now beginning to unravel the biggest medical coverup in recent history. The cognitive decline of Joe Biden wasn't exactly a state secret. But in a nuclear age where accidental or deliberate launches of nuclear missiles are an ever-present threat, any kind of impairment by a U.S. president cannot be tolerated. Ever.
The coverup began in the White House when aides, desperate to hang on to their own power, refused to do what was best for the country and blow the whistle on Biden's mental decline. This was facilitated by a media so politically biased that the story of the decade was ignored in the interest of keeping Joe Biden in office. I don't blame reporters for that. The reports of Biden's cognitive difficulties were sent up the chain (as they should have been). It was editors and executives who scotched the story of the decade.
Remember the blow-up over the Hur report where the special counsel appeared to take pity on Biden and not prosecute him because of his forgetfulness? Biden was portrayed in Robert Hur's report as an "elderly man with a poor memory" who has "diminished faculties in advancing age." This interview was in October 2023 and 8 months later, Biden's disastrous debate with Trump revealed the extent of his decline.
But at the time the special counsel submitted his report in February 2024, the White House had already been covering up Biden's decline for months.
"They don't know what they're talking about," the president snapped to reporters after Hur's characterization of the interview was revealed. "My memory is fine."
The president's most vocal defender until his last day as a presidential candidate was his vice president, Kamala Harris.
"The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [is] clearly politically motivated," Harris claimed at a community forum the day after Hur's report. "We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw."
That "higher level of integrity" can start with the vice president, who lied continuously to protect Biden.
Let us not forget before being subsumed by subsequent events (including the July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump) that Hur's report did not exactly arrive in a cognitive vacuum. In just a handful of days prior, Biden confused French President Emmanuel Macron with the long-dead François Mitterrand (while initially saying Mitterrand was from Germany), attributed a comment by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the also-deceased Helmut Kohl, and blanked on the contemporarily relevant name of "Hamas."
Watchdog groups had already by this time documented Biden's historic aversion to public questioning—just 32 press briefings (most of them joint appearances with foreign leaders) in his first three years, according to the University of California, Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project, compared to 52 for Trump, 66 for Barack Obama, 65 for George W. Bush, and 111 for Bill Clinton. Biden granted just 74 interviews over that span, many with celebrities and late-night comics, compared to Trump's 273. He discontinued the White House tradition of year-end press conferences, became in 2023 the first president of this century not to make an appearance at an attack site on the anniversary of 9/11, and this year even turned down the traditional softball interview at the Super Bowl.
Some influential pundits ran interference for the White House, abetting the fiction that nothing was wrong with the president.
"Talk of his alleged mental decline," tweeted Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter John Harwood in March, is "utter bullshit." City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis in March excoriated The New York Times for even polling about Biden's age-related fitness. "That they even asked this question is evidence of the bias—the agenda—in their poll," Jarvis wrote on Threads. "Who made age an 'issue'? The credulous Times falling into the right-wing's projection. This is not journalism. Shameful."
There were a couple of attempts to break through the circled wagons surrounding Biden. The New York Times ran a long piece about White House aides and their efforts to hide Biden's decline. A Wall Street Journal piece, an incredibly well-sourced, 3,000-word article on the extraordinary efforts made by Biden's staff to keep him in office, told an even more frightening story. Neither outlet offered any solutions to the problem. That wasn't their job. But the solution was obvious; the president's most trusted aides would have to enlist his wife Jill to get him to step aside.
That never happened. Instead, terrified Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama threatened Biden with exposure if he didn't step aside. This he did in July, and Harris was immediately transformed into a Democratic Party savior and savior of democracy. This is the same person who had assured the American people that Joe Biden was fit as a fiddle and that anyone who said anything differently had no integrity.
KLP, Harris, and the White House aides who lied to the media and the people need to be hauled before Congress to detail why they refused to accede to the dictates of reality and, for the good of the country, get Biden to step down.
Biden is still president. And that should frighten anyone who knows of the knife's edge the world is sitting on.
