Photo: Ken Cedeno/Reuters
Joe Biden will exit the White House with as little fanfare as any president in modern memory. Forever sandwiched between Donald Trump presidencies and unwilling, in his 80s, to engage with conventional media for any length of time — there are few interviews, televised or in print, for Americans to grasp on to — he will recede, lost in various Trump- and Musk-fired news cycles. “It is hard,” Peter Baker of the New York Times recently wrote, “to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.”
This is now conventional wisdom, in the way opposition to the Iraq War, as the 2000s wore on and the Middle East immolated, became the new political consensus. Many pundits, journalists, and politicians who supported the war either recanted or pretended they were on the right side all along. Trump himself fell into the latter camp, blasting away at his war-supporting GOP rivals in the 2016 primary despite his own documented support for the invasion in 2003. If many politicians and media elites never had to pay much of a political price for getting history so wrong, they at least had to grapple, in some form, with their failure. Some, like Andrew Sullivan, were refreshingly candid about why they had trusted George W. Bush in the first place.
The conspiracy of silence around Biden’s age-related decline does not rise to the level of the cognoscenti’s embrace of the Iraq War — it did not lead to the deaths of thousands of American troops and many more Iraqi civilians—but it does, in its enforcement of a remarkably foolhardy groupthink, demand its own kind of reckoning. And it’s not at all apparent such a reckoning will ever come. As trust in the media plummets and the Democratic Party itself limps into a murky future, once again locked out of power in Washington, probing questions must be asked of how, for years on end, so many influential people insisted Biden was capable of not only campaigning again but governing for another four years.
Last month, The Wall Street Journal extensively documented how Biden’s inner circle limited contact with other administration officials, politicians, donors, and journalists, privately acknowledging the elderly Biden could not perform the duties of a conventional president. At events, aides often repeated instructions to Biden, telling him where to enter or exit a stage. As early as his first year in the White House, aides were canceling meetings when Biden seemed “off.” “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” a former aide recalled a National Security official saying, according to the Journal. Meetings, the newspaper reported, were started later in the day because Biden seemed to struggle early in the morning. Most members of Congress, meanwhile, couldn’t talk to Biden at all. Staff locked him away. The implication was that the president simply wasn’t able to sustain complex, one-on-one interactions.
Will 2024 be remembered for the assassination attempt on Trump’s life and the “fight fight fight” photo? Or for Biden dropping out of the race after the worst televised performance in the history of presidential debates? Both, perhaps, but it’s the Biden chaos that might linger longer in history, since Americans have a habit of forgetting the would-be assassins — Thomas Crooks, in this case — who shoot at presidents and don’t kill them. (Neither of the women who attempted to kill Gerald Ford are remembered, and John Hinckley only endures, vaguely, because he was deeply obsessed with Jodie Foster.)
Baker’s report in the Times on Biden’s diminishment reflects the retroactive consensus: Of course Biden could never really run again or theoretically govern the nation until he was 86. Except virtually every Democrat and left-leaning pundit insisted otherwise until the June debate between Biden and Trump, and much of the media was glad to portray age-related concerns as a right-wing disinformation operation. The Times, in the days before the debate, warned of a “distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post said he found the “fretting over Biden’s age tedious” and blamed it on “disinformation from the right portraying him as drooling and senile.” Margaret Sullivan, the veteran journalist and media critic, dismissed chatter about Biden’s cognition and performance as ageism. Joe Scarborough declared, infamously, that “this version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
Democrats themselves were no less insistent on Biden’s fitness. As late as July, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was calling Biden “extraordinarily competent.” “You need to let Joe Biden be Joe Biden,” Michigan representative Debbie Dingell insisted earlier that year. When Dean Phillips, a representative from Minnesota, launched a long-shot primary campaign against Biden, citing the president’s age as a central motivator for running, he endured resentment and rage from the Democratic Establishment. “I don’t understand what his goals are. I just don’t understand,” said Colorado senator John Hickenlooper. Primaya Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was no less dismissive. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what he’s running on that’s different from what President Biden is running on.”
A retrospective narrative of the Biden years is that it took too long for the truth to come out but that Democrats shouldn’t be blamed for not understanding Biden’s deficiencies until the summer of 2024. After waving away criticisms of Biden’s age-related stumbles, Matthew Yglesias wrote in February that “zero information has leaked into the public domain suggesting that Biden is behind the scenes incapable of doing the job.” Once Biden struggled to speak coherently on television with Trump, Yglesias noted, while calling for Biden to step aside, that “it was correct to withhold judgment until we saw the debate.” Yet this plainly was not correct. Yglesias shouldn’t be singled out here, since he was one of many prominent Democrats who believed such a falsehood, but he is emblematic of a blinkered worldview that directly led to the return of President Trump.
I wrote, in September 2022, that Biden shouldn’t seek another term. I was not a White House reporter, an elected official, or a special insider with great insights into the Biden administration. I simply used my own eyes and ears. Biden, by then, was already mangling basic statistics in public remarks and calling Kamala Harris the “president.” Soon after, he would claim his son, Beau, died in Iraq and not of brain cancer. He would ask whether a congresswoman who had recently died was at one of his White House events. It was obvious, if you consumed any amount of news and weren’t wilfully blinding yourself, that something was deeply amiss. (Baker himself, days before the 2022 midterms, noted these Biden stumbles — but the Times did not produce much in-depth reporting on his decline in the subsequent year and a half.)
What does it say about the Democratic Party and the media broadly that Biden’s presidency was essentially ended by the simple act of showing up on television to debate his opponent? As cable-TV ratings crater and traditional media struggles to maintain the trust it has left, this question should haunt the many political elites who giddily lied to themselves and others for three and a half years. What is worse, ignorance or outright deception? Democrats and their allies in the media engaged in both. Now Trump will reign again. Whatever happens over the next four years, the Democratic Party certainly earned it.
