Unless Joe Biden de-ages 20 years and shakes the mental issues that have latched onto him like barnacles, we’re bound to read more stories about his rapid decrepitude. We’ve known for years that Joe Biden is cooked. The liberal media finally can’t defend him anymore, lest they look like reporters from North Korea. Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine penned a damning and brutal piece about Joe Biden’s state of decline, which includes the president forgetting the names of longtime friends. Others who get access to these swanky events told Nuzzi that they might be unable to vote for Biden in 2024 because they don’t know if he’s in charge.
While anonymously sourced, Nuzzi spoke with scores of Democrats and friends of the family that painted a brutal picture of the president whom members of his party currently besiege to drop out following that June 27 debate performance where Trump obliterated him. The first part of her piece outlines the elaborate and, at times, over-the-top protocols the Biden team puts in place to prevent gaffes. Nuzzi added that there were fundraisers where staffers tasked with keeping Biden from humiliating himself were a significant proportion of the attendees (via NYMag) [emphasis mine]:
Cenk Uygur commenting on Olivia Nuzzi's bombshell report about the White House hiding Biden's cognitive decline:
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) July 5, 2024
"Olivia Nuzzi has an amazing article in the Intelligencer where she's talking about all these interactions with Biden. Donors, reporters etc.
They did a guessing game… pic.twitter.com/oAiw8svuTh
When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. At a White House event last year, a guest recalled, with horror, realizing that the president would not be able to stay for the reception because, it was clear, he would not be able to make it through the reception. The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after all.
Others told me the president was becoming increasingly hard to get ahold of, even as it related to official government business, the type of things any U.S. president would communicate about on a regular basis with high-level officials across the world. Biden instead was cocooned within mounting layers of bureaucracy, spoken for more than he was speaking or spoken to.
Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”
Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.
The initial spin on that from Biden and his campaign was that Trump had a bad night, as evidenced by the national polling, which didn’t move. That changed within 36 hours of the debate. First, Biden was trailing Trump in key battleground states pre-debate. He was down almost four points in Michigan, a must-win state. OpenLabs, a progressive polling firm, painted an even worse picture, showing a massive drop across the board in these battleground states, with supposedly blue states becoming redder. Forty percent of Biden’s 2020 supporters felt he needed to drop out.
Trump had a bad night, Joe? I think that’s your declining mental facilities showing again.
If it gets to the named sources stage, it's probably not gonna be helpful to whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be, Biden or otherwise. But it will get to that stage if the White House is too stubborn or incapacitated to take the hint. https://t.co/ju4MDnhNbF
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 5, 2024
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