There are a great many commentaries pointing out the degree to which Joe Biden – never a tower of intellect or vision at his best – has fallen cognitively. I’d like to think I’ve written a couple of them myself.
But Matthew Continetti’s piece for the Washington Free Beacon is especially good…therefore, especially alarming.
Here is how it begins:
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away
— Paul Simon
President Biden “shows signs of slipping,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Journalists Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes—no conservatives—spoke to 45 people who have met with the president and noticed his mental and physical decline. They recount, in detail, several meetings over the past year where Biden has been forgetful, confused, and out of it. The president, Linskey and Hughes report, “appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.”
No kidding.
You don’t need the Journal to tell you that Biden is diminished. You need only to open your eyes. Go over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report into Biden’s unauthorized removal of classified documents. Review Biden’s Oval Office meltdown after Hur released his findings. Watch Biden try to sit at a D-Day commemoration in France on Thursday.
Or read, if you dare, the transcript of Time magazine correspondent Massimo Calabresi and editor in chief Sam Jacobs’s recent interview of Biden. It appeared the same day as Linskey and Hughes’s story.
This is the interview where Biden says—twice—that Russia invaded Russia. Where, immediately after saying, “I’m not going to comment,” Biden says that “there is every reason” to believe Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war against Hamas for political gain. Then Biden says that the 19 percent increase in prices since he became president is due to “shrinkflation” and that he could “take” the Time reporter who asks about his advanced age.
And here is how it ends:
In any other era, the White House, congressional Democrats, and the national Democratic Party would be in full-blown panic at the president’s physical, mental, and political condition. But because we live in the era of Trump, Biden’s allies have continued to deflect and downplay the deleterious effects of his age, his enduring unpopularity, and his haphazard, too-little, too-late, incompetent, and iatrogenic policymaking.
Biden is not just slipping personally. He’s slipping politically. The polls have barely moved since May 31, when a New York jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records. Biden continues to run behind Trump, as he has since the fall of 2023. The reason the election is close is not that the public likes Biden. It’s that the public is reluctant to send Trump back to the White House.
Now, with his personal condition becoming more noticeable and the Trump trial failing to move the polls massively in his direction, Biden has one more opportunity to reset the race. The debate scheduled for June 27 has become more important than I had thought. A triumphant performance might revive Biden’s candidacy. But a flop could end his presidency.
Simply stated, Joe Biden is a cognitive mess. And anyone with eyes and ears, who is not so full of Trump and/or more generally Republican hatred, knows it.
As for Mr. Continetti’s evaluation of what could happen in a June 27th debate? Frankly, I disbelieve there will be one.
Democrats cannot send Joe Biden out to extemporize; he can barely read the pre-written texts he is handed. Even the fact that it will be moderated by two Trump-haters on Trump-hating CNN won’t be enough to save him.
I believe Biden – his puppeteers, actually – will find a way (almost certainly blaming Trump for it) to bug out of the debate. In fact, it would not surprise me if, by June 27th, he is no longer the Democrat candidate.
We’ll see…..
