Donald Trump told us so.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, President Trump warned the American people that Joe Biden was not up for the job of the presidency. In speeches, debates, and especially interviews, Biden showed his 77 years – and then some. He showed a consistent pattern of losing his place, confusing people and places, and – old habits die hard – lying whenever he got cornered.
This pattern was not only there for all to see. It had been on display for decades.
His first presidential campaign in 1988 was sunk when it was revealed he plagiarized part of a campaign speech by a British politician. He was also revealed to have lifted other people’s work while in law school, where he graduated near the bottom of his class (which he also lied about). When asked about this by a New Hampshire voter, Biden answered in typical fashion: “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.”
Biden also embellished his own biography throughout his political career. He lied about marching for Civil Rights in the 1960s. He lied about being shot at during a visit to Iraq in 2007. He lied about being arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.
You can be forgiven if you never heard these stories last year. The media made up their mind as soon as Biden won his party’s nomination that their job was not to report on the former vice president but to ensure that he defeated President Trump.
Not only did the press downplay Biden’s career of brazen dishonesty and hide his obvious mental decline since leaving the vice presidency. They went even further and actively suppressed inconvenient facts that might have hurt his campaign.
Remember all last year, when the official narrative from political and scientific elites was that Covid-19 came, naturally, from bats? Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence of the virus’s escape from a notorious and insecure laboratory in Wuhan, China, the media and Big Tech cracked down on anyone who pointed it out.
As long as the truth might help Donald Trump – who presciently speculated about Chinese culpability for the pandemic – the “lab leak theory” was denounced as a conspiracy theory and “misinformation.” Only after Biden was inaugurated did government officials finally admit that, yes, Covid could have come from the Wuhan lab. Facebook stopped suppressing the story on the same day.
Later in the campaign, Twitter and Facebook both restricted users’ ability to share information about Hunter Biden’s missing laptop computer, which contained emails pointing toward corrupt relationships with foreign businesses. The Biden campaign said the laptop story was “fake news,” so the media obediently shut it down. Subsequent revelations have shown the story is probably true, as even Hunter Biden himself has admitted.
(Nor is this the media being “careful” with their reporting. The same reporters covering for Biden giddily blew up the “Russia hoax” for years after having reason to suspect it was the fraud we now know it was.)
Had Biden been forced to explain himself in the heat of the campaign, the American people would have seen what we’ve all witnessed this past week: a declining senior “losing a step” as we politely say. While his bungling in Afghanistan led to America’s worst international humiliation since Vietnam, Biden nevertheless left the White House for vacation several times. For days, he refused to speak to the nation or take questions from the press. He finally agreed to a single interview, with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos – former top advisor to President Bill Clinton.
Despite this friendly environment, Biden’s performance was so incoherent and factually deficient that as of this writing, ABC has still not released the full unedited video of the interview.
In just seven months, President Biden has presided over skyrocketing inflation, a border crisis, a crime wave, the discrediting of federal public health agencies, and now the chaos in Afghanistan. Most of these problems are of Biden’s own making. Yet all year, the only thing political reporters have asked him about are his favorite ice cream flavors.
The petulance, incoherence, and incompetence Biden has exhibited this week are not new. This is exactly who he has been for years. It was exactly who he was during the campaign – and the world is noticing. If he can’t contend with a lapdog press and tinhorn thugs in Kabul, how can he possibly manage China, Russia, the border, inflation, or our runaway national debt? We all know. He can’t, and never could.
This president deserves almost all the blame for the swarm of emergencies he has created during his short, bumbling tenure. But never forget: the political media deserves almost all the blame for him being elected in the first place.