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President Joe Biden is too senile to face felony charges but fully expects another four years in the Oval Office.
Last week, the president sought to reassure voters of his fitness for re-election with a hasty press conference to address the bombshell conclusions outlined in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. President Biden, Hur’s team wrote, is an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him by — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur concluded. Biden apparently forgot when he was vice president and struggled to recall the timeline of his son’s death in interviews with federal investigators. The president has repeatedly peddled the false claim that his son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, had actually died in the Iraq War, which ended four years earlier.
“My memory is fine,” the president exclaimed in last week’s White House press conference, during which he confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt.
At 81, Biden is already the oldest man to ever sit at the Resolute desk. The incumbent would be 82 by the time of inauguration next year, sworn in to lead for another four years until 86. Concerns surrounding the president’s age and acumen, however, existed for good reason even before Biden became the Democrats’ nominee in 2020, at 77. Biden has a history of confusing his wife and sister on stage, mumbling through the words of the Declaration of Independence, swapping “Super Tuesday” with “Super Thursday,” mixing up for which office he was campaigning, and wondering which state he was in, more than once. This was all before Biden clinched the Democratic nomination.
Once on the campaign trail, Biden struggled to remain coherent in the few stops beyond the protective confines of his Delaware basement.
Of the two debates Biden participated in with President Donald Trump, which featured friendly moderators for the Democrat challenger, the former vice president was often flustered, at one point shutting down. “Will you shut up, man?” Biden said.
The two podium debates already marked a departure from the modern tradition of three on the fall lineup, with a town hall forum on the calendar in between. The town hall event, however, was called off after the moderator from C-SPAN publicly exposed himself as a partisan hack just before the red-carpet showdown. The supposedly independent Commission on Presidential Debates — which was run entirely by Biden supporters — proposed moving the planned second debate into a virtual cable-style matchup to the Democrat’s clear benefit. Negotiations ultimately broke down, and Biden refused to participate in the town hall format with an impartial moderator.
Instead, Biden sat down for a town hall with former Clinton White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, who completely ignored the recent scandals involving the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes.
The Commission on Presidential Debates has presented four debates on the 2024 calendar, including three for the major party nominees and one for vice presidential candidates. Voters, however, are likely to be disappointed if they expect the debates to move forward as planned. Biden’s campaign is almost certain to manufacture excuses to protect their octogenarian incumbent from the prime-time spotlight for three reasons: Biden’s cognition has demonstrably declined, more evidence implicating the president in criminal influence-peddling has put Biden under a congressional impeachment inquiry, and the RNC is finally demanding fair treatment with an impartial forum.
With roughly three-quarters of American voters and “half of Democrats” possessing serious reservations about Biden’s mental and physical health, according to an NBC News survey, Biden is unlikely to risk hours on a live debate stage with Trump. This time, Biden would certainly be antagonized with more questions about his family’s business schemes that he can’t escape. The president might blame Russia again over the allegations of corruption that surfaced from his son’s abandoned Delaware laptop, but even legacy news outlets have finally authenticated the computer years after the election.