Let us face an unpleasant fact that many seem curiously reluctant to report or discuss. President Joe Biden appears to be suffering from severe and worsening cognitive decline which often makes his public appearances an embarrassing debacle.
As Americans cast their votes in the midterm elections which may well see Biden’s Democrats lose their slim majorities in one or both houses of Congress, the mental state of the leader of the free world should be of pressing concern to everyone on the planet. But we hear very little about it. Much of the US media made a tacit agreement that even mentioning the subject was an offence against good taste.
It is not as if evidence of the President’s decay is not abundant and out there for those who care to look. Even before he was elected in 2020 his staff hid him away in his Delaware home and kept him off the campaign trail, using Covid as a convenient excuse for his hermit status.
Nonetheless during the campaign Biden – who turns 80 later this month and is America’s oldest ever president – managed to mash up members of his family, appearing to mistake his sister for his wife. He also said he was running for the Senate rather than the presidency, and referred to his opponent Donald Trump as ‘George’.
Lately Biden’s public lapses have crossed the border of credibility
Since his election, these ‘gaffes’ seem to have accelerated at an alarming rate. Among the myriad mistakes, misspeaks, and sheer inexplicable gibberish caught on camera are multiple examples of him calling his deputy ‘President Harris’ and shaking hands with the air when people aren’t there. He’s also been filmed being unable to find his way off a stage, getting lost on the White House lawn, reading out instructions on his cue cards and falling fast asleep in the middle of a meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister.
Even more seriously – and worryingly because it affects war and peace and could cost lives – are Biden’s public goofs when he goes off piste and announces sudden policy changes. The White House is then forced to instantly ‘walk back’ and correct his errors within minutes of the President holding forth.
Examples of his loose lips enunciating before engaging what’s left of his brain include Biden announcing that US policy was to promote regime change in Moscow. So too was his contradictory confusion on whether the US would or would not resist a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Biden had never been a fluent or felicitous talker, and often stammered when speaking. At first his handlers in the White House were able to laugh off his outbursts as Joe’s usual verbal ‘gaffes’. But lately, and despite his refusal to take a test of his cognitive ability, Biden’s public lapses have crossed the border of credibility. His calling out a Congresswoman who he had ‘forgotten’ had died in a tragic car crash back in August, and his recent claim that his son Beau had died in Iraq rather than of cancer in the States some years later, demonstrated this beyond any doubt.
The reason for the Democrats’ denial of their leader’s decline and the Trappist silence on the subject is obvious: there is no credible candidate able to take his place should Biden’s condition deteriorate to the extent that he has to leave office. Vice President Harris is even more unpopular than he is and has demonstrated a scary ignorance of basic political geography – such as calling North Korea a close US ally.
Whether the Democrats manage to cling on in Congress this week or whether the Republicans take control and reduce the presidency to impotent gridlock is, in a way, irrelevant. Biden is already a powerless puppet of a president manipulated by forces of which, in his brain-fogged way, he is barely aware. Whatever the result of the midterms the Biden presidency is effectively over.
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