The Wall Street Journal has been covering in-depth the inner workings of the Biden White House and their attempts to obfuscate and manage the rapid decline of Joe Biden. In June, they were one of the few papers, if not the only, to document Biden’s mental slippage. They were excoriated in the press for days only to be vindicated by the president’s historically awful debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27. That event set off a panic among Democrats, where some are calling for the president to step aside, megadonors have stopped writing checks, and the party writ large is poised for all-out civil war over Joe.
It's never the crime; it’s the cover-up. We all know Joe Biden is old. We’ve seen that he’s lost a step or 12, but what’s infuriating liberals, Democrats, and the electorate is the elaborate scheme to hide this from the public. The liberal media claims to be shell-shocked by Biden’s deteriorating health—that’s bunk. They helped cover it up. However, the publication did dole out another piece about the massive effort to insulate and shield the president from the public. Notably, our German allies knew Biden would get gassed early in the evening by 2022. So, they arranged an informal, private meeting at an Alpine resort to discuss the ongoing Ukraine war. They were aghast to hear that Biden didn’t show up, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken telling them the president had to go to bed (via WSJ):
“At one point, Biden couldn’t recall the word for ‘veteran.’ The president asked the group to help him find the word, saying he wanted to refer to a person who had served in the Army or Navy”https://t.co/PIpf2P3Nl9 pic.twitter.com/2On2935oHr
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 9, 2024
People close to Biden blame a handful of advisers for putting in place a strategy that minimized the president’s age-related struggles. Those advisers include the president’s big-picture thinkers: Anita Dunn, who is responsible for the White House’s communications strategy and echoes the president’s disdain for the news media; along with Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, decadeslong political counselors.
Biden allies outside the White House also pointed to lesser-known aides who have served as gatekeepers for the president, including Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal, close confidants of Biden and first lady Jill Biden, respectively.
[…]
The president’s public appearances and his private interactions, according to people who described them, suggest that Biden has moments where he is sharp and detail-oriented. At other times, he is forgetful, stumbles over words and struggles to convey his thoughts. Those kinds of slip-ups have become more frequent, according to people who have met with the president, with many widely shared on social media.
Some who have spent time with the president after not seeing him for a while said they were surprised by how much he had slowed. Last summer, a former top Biden adviser who had met with the president told an associate the meeting was “not good” and that Biden had noticeably aged since they had last seen each other.
The president’s abysmal debate performance was a crystallizing moment for some Biden backers, who said it caused them to reassess previous interactions with the president. Another former Biden adviser said the Atlanta debate caused many people to piece together gnawing concerns about Biden’s mental acuity they had long harbored.
Lawmakers in both parties say they don’t get enough face time with the president. Biden took almost a week to call Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) after the debate. A White House official said the president has spoken to at least 20 lawmakers since the debate. Biden’s team refused requests by Republican House leaders to meet with the president, instead offering conversations with senior White House aides.
Biden has had fewer small meetings with lawmakers as his term has gone on, visitor logs show.
German officials, aware of Biden’s fatigue at night, sought to accommodate the president by planning a June 2022 event with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the early evening.
The informal event, a soiree at the Alpine resort Schloss Elmau during the Group of Seven summit, was arranged as a confidential meeting on Ukraine in a relaxed setting. Biden didn’t show, surprising the chancellor and his aides, officials said. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived and announced that Biden had to go to bed, according to two people who were there.
Of course, the spokesperson for the Biden campaign and White House pushed back on the many unflattering passages showing the president’s inability to do the job, albeit with the most unconvincing statements you’d see printed in Soviet Russia. Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman, ripped the anonymous sources spilling details to reporters on Biden’s health, adding, “None of them change the facts at play this election and what this campaign will be focused on every single day: that President Biden is the most accomplished president in modern history.”
The most accomplished? In what? Driving inflation to unacceptable levels, plunging the world into chaos, not rebuilding the economy, and taking a lackadaisical approach to the supply chain issues, to name a few. Oh, and letting the southern border become a warzone. Meanwhile, those names, Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal are part of a reported cadre that has enveloped Biden in a cocoon where the president has lost all independence. Aides in the West Wing aren’t sure who’s running the country either, so what’s happening? The White House’s abysmal handling of the visits by a Parkinson’s Disease expert only accentuates these questions. What are they hiding?
