“Biden’s age is very clearly the most [important] non-Trump issue in this [election], a New York Times political reporter mused Thursday afternoon. “Polling says so. Voters say so.”
“It’s just the [White House/D.C.],” reporter Astead Herndon continued, “have had a sorta gentleman’s agreement for the last year to pretend like it’s not.”
“Maybe that ends now.”
His tweet followed special prosecutor Robert Hur’s report, laying out in excruciating detail the debilitating mental decline of the president. He was retweeted by his colleague Michael Barbaro, host of the popular Times podcast, “The Daily.”
And the gloves were off Thursday evening, when White House executive staff marched their president before the cameras, hopped up and ready to dispel any of those investigative details about how he’d forgotten what years he was vice president, didn’t know when his son had died, and was too senile to stand trial for the same crimes his Department of Justice is prosecuting his rival for.
The president started off strong, rattling page numbers off the teleprompter like a man who knew his facts cold. He gave a pretty good dunk on Fox News’ Peter Doocy, but the questions kept coming — and for once it wasn’t just Doocy asking about his fitness for office.
Thursday night’s emergency press conference needed to be President Joe Biden’s shining moment. Instead, within mere minutes the 81-year-old slowed down, mumbled, and began to slur. The early jolt of energy had lasted about a minute longer than a whippit.
And his troubles had just begun. Visibly fading, the leader of the free world closed out the conference by heading stage left to the comforting arms of an eager staffer but stopped when he heard a question about Gaza, turned about-face, and returned to the podium.
“The conduct… of the response,” the president softly droned, as he flipped blankly through his briefing book, “in gazz.. in the Gaza Strip… has been over the top.”
“I think, that, uh, as you know, initially, the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate.”
And the game was up. He’d been sent on a hopped-up, two-minute mission with one thing to do: reassure the American people not to trust their lyin’ ears. The point of the speech was to assure us he was cognizant, and any reports to the opposite were malarkey. Instead, he ended the conference mumbling into the microphone, confusing Israel’s border with America’s, and Mexico’s president with Egypt’s.
The spectacle followed on a week where he’d forgotten the name of Hamas and, worse yet, confused France’s president with a man who’d died in 1996, and Germany’s former chancellor with another dead man who’d left office just two years later.
The president had no clothes, everyone could see it, and corporate-reporter-Twitter — long a fun house of denial and Trump derangement — was alight with the panicked observation that maybe the president of the United States might not have all his faculties about him.
Maybe the “sorta gentleman’s agreement” was over. It had become too difficult to maintain.
But who was this agreement with, in the first place? Certainly not with the voters, who could see Joe Biden was a man clearly in decline when he was nominated, but was still hoisted on the country over the objections of his former boss as well as the party faithful.
So maybe this agreement was just between the powerful people who mean to rule us. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC, after all, ran his campaign for him. They let him hold rallies that consisted of automobiles flashing their blinkers, while the candidate Zoomed in from a basement. They told us the lights “shooting out from the Lincoln Memorial along the Reflecting Pool [were] … almost extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.” And anyone who dared question this was shunned.
And now they tell us his age is an issue. They’re going to shout hard questions, just like you heard since Donald Trump hosted the children’s Easter egg roll. Don’t take their word for it, though. This “agreement” was never with you.
