In the hot mess that is U.S. politics, it’s sometimes difficult to decide which is the less-awful choice in a system dominated by two remarkably repulsive political parties. Should you pick the nativist, economically illiterate authoritarians or the antisemitic, economically illiterate totalitarians? New evidence about the deteriorated mental condition of former president Joe Biden — a situation covered-up by top Democrats and dismissed by the brand-name press — suggest that, as bad as President Donald Trump is, his election was a necessary break from an unsustainable situation.
If only Americans were more willing to consider options beyond the limited Democrat/Republican menu.
Transcripts of interviews conducted with Biden by special counsel Robert Hur in October 2023 during an investigation into the handling of classified documents revealed a national chief executive whose mental faculties were failing and unreliable. “He did not remember when he was vice-president,” Hur
wrote in his report
, and “he did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” As a result, Hur declined to prosecute Biden for mishandling secret material, concluding that in Biden a jury would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
But the release last week of
audio recordings
of that interview finally ended any pretense that Joe Biden was still up to the demands of the presidency in 2023 — and for an unknown time before. They’re painful to listen to, with the then-president meandering and weak in his speech, fumbling chronology and requiring repeated prompting from his interviewer. (Biden’s
prostate cancer diagnosis
adds another serious concern, though it’s not obvious that it worsened his performance in office.)
As
Axios
’s Marc Caputo and Alex Thompson, who obtained the recordings,
noted
, “The newly released recordings of Biden having trouble recalling such details — while occasionally slurring words and muttering — shed light on why his White House refused to release the recordings last year, as questions mounted about his mental acuity.”
Thompson is also the co-author, with CNN’s Jake Tapper, of
“
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
,” a book belatedly pulling back the curtain on the debilitated state of the former president. Thompson and Tapper reveal that powerful people knew the former president was incapable of exercising the responsibilities of his office and pretended otherwise. This was obvious to anybody who saw Biden repeatedly stumble over his words on television even before he embarrassed himself in the June 2024 debate with Donald Trump. That event finally prompted him — or those around him — to withdraw from the race and
essentially appoint then-vicepresident Kamala Harris as the heir
to the Democratic presidential candidacy.
Last year, t
he Wall Street Journal
reported
that, “Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater.… There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.”
Worse, though, Thompson and Tapper suggest the president wasn’t just handled, but the powers of the office were exercised during that time not by the person elected to the position, but by a clique of appointed officials who most Americans couldn’t pick from a police lineup if their lives depended on it.
“Five people were running the country,” a Biden administration source
told the authors
. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
The plan for Biden’s re-election, they were told by an aide, was: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years — he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”
So, the so-called
politburo
, as it was referred to by White House insiders, planned to continue exercising power in the shadows, using Biden as a sock puppet.
Unfortunately, among those shouting down anybody who called attention to Biden’s deterioration was Jake Tapper himself, co-author of
“Original Sin”
(Thompson has a cleaner history). In 2020, he
infamously shut down Lara Trump
when she called attention to what she described as Biden’s “cognitive decline.” He’s
since apologized
for his behaviour, but the election is over and, well, he has a book to sell.
Tapper was hardly alone. Press outlets sympathetic to Democrats insisted that video and audio clips of the then-president looking and sounding overdue for retirement were “
cheapfakes
,” a catchall term encompassing some misleading information as well as a lot of recordings that were just politically inconvenient for a president and political party
favoured by many members of the media
.
That leaves us now with Republicans in control of Congress and President Trump in the White House. I’ve written that Trump’s economics are often
indistinguishable from those of socialist
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and his taste for exercising unilateral power continues an unpleasant trend towards
turning the presidency into an elected monarchy
. It’s too early to pass a final verdict on his second term, but so far Donald Trump has been a bad president.
But the U.S. political system is notoriously rigid and presents an overwhelmingly binary choice between Republicans and Democrats, political parties that have dominated the scene since the mid-19
th
century. In the end, the winners were either going to be Trump and his populist GOP, or the Democrats who had covered up for a president incapable of performing his duties, quietly ceded the powers of the office to an unelected “politburo” and then defied democratic norms to appoint Harris as his successor.
And the Democrats are heavily enmeshed with the media who were supposed to cover all of this, but instead largely ran cover for their preferred politicians until it was time to sell books.
“The elites, including much of the Democratic party, have given up on representative democracy,”
observed
Martin Gurri, the author of
“
The Revolt of the Republic and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
.” “That is a terrible truth.”
Handing power back to those who surrendered the powers of the presidency to an unelected committee that quietly operated in the shadows with the tacit approval of political officials and journalists was a frightening prospect. Unfortunately — very much so — the only alternative was Trump and his allies.
If we’re lucky, maybe Americans will have better — and more — options the next time we cast ballots.
National Post
