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“A bombshell new book from CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson paints a damning portrait of then-President Joe Biden during the 2024 election, depicting a president with diminished physical and mental faculties that aides and advisers concealed from the public…
“Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in July, following a disastrous debate performance against then-Republican nominee Donald Trump, in which Biden repeatedly stared at Trump while slack-jawed and made halting statements where he appeared to lose his train of thought.” Newsweek
The left is critical of Biden’s decision to run for re-election and prominent Democrats for not speaking out sooner.
“[The authors] emphasize that they gathered most of the book’s information ‘after the election of 2024, when officials and aides felt considerably freer to talk’—but even then, few felt free enough to allow their names to be used. That says a lot about the persistence of a careerist culture that impelled so many Democratic leaders and party operators to help cover up Biden’s decline in the first place…
“Partisan denial transcended ideology… Progressive legislators were no better than their centrist colleagues in resisting pressure from the Biden White House to pretend that the president was fit to run again, while the Democratic Party’s power structure insisted on a position opposed by a sizable majority of the party’s voters. In early 2023, an Associated Press poll found that only 37 percent of Democrats said they wanted Biden to run for reelection.”
Norman Solomon, The Nation
“When I talk to Democrats about what went wrong in 2024, they often speak of problems with the party’s ‘brand’ or ‘messaging.’ But the problem goes deeper than not being online enough or getting distracted from kitchen table issues—it’s that, in dismissing legitimate concerns about Biden’s capacity to serve, they undermined their credibility with the broader electorate and fostered disillusionment among their own base…
“Biden’s misguided reelection bid not only left Kamala Harris too little time to mount a successful run of her own; it also left her in the shaky position of having to either admit her boss may not up to the job he held and had sought to keep another four years, or to claim, as his second-in-command, that she had seen no signs of his decline. She chose the latter… It'll be hard to earn the public's trust if they don't face up to their 2024 failures first.”
Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair
“Trump’s campaign was full of sexist and racist attacks against Harris. Bigotry and misogyny clearly played a part in her defeat. Still, to blame Harris’s defeat on sexism, as Biden does, is a massive cop-out. Harris didn’t lose because she was a mixed-race woman. She lost because Biden’s hubris meant she had very little time to put together a campaign and because, once she was the nominee, she refused to put any distance between herself and Biden’s unpopular policies…
“It’s also disastrous, I think, to keep pushing the narrative, as Biden is doing, that Harris lost because of sexism. Saying that the US isn’t ready to elect a female president is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes it more likely that white male candidates, seen as a safer bet, are favoured over women. Yes, there’s plenty of misogyny in the US, but the lesson to take from 2024 isn’t that the country isn’t ready for a female president, it’s that the country is desperately ready for change.”
Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian
The right accuses both prominent Democrats and the media of deceiving the public about Biden’s cognitive decline.
The right accuses both prominent Democrats and the media of deceiving the public about Biden’s cognitive decline.
“It’s as if everyone around Biden feared his mental decline’s effect on the election, without any fear for his mental decline’s consequences for the country… Remember Stephen L. Miller’s repeated observations about how often Biden videos featured jump cuts, suggesting that Biden could rarely read two sentences off a teleprompter without error in one take?…
“Remember when we noticed that in the White House Situation Room, all of the nametags are facing Biden instead of facing out from the speaker? Remember how we speculated that it was to help Biden remember the names of his top cabinet officials, and everyone insisted that was paranoid nonsense? Good times, good times.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“How many times did we hear during Biden's presidency that he ‘ran rings around aides half his age?’ Or that Biden's physical energy outpaced those same younger aides? And the media kept swallowing that even while Biden's public appearances entirely belied those claims, with Biden getting lost and/or falling on stages, extemporaneous speech trailing off into dead ends, and his memory clearly failing him in public remarks?…
“The level of deceit from both the White House and the Biden campaign in the final year of his presidency is simply breathtaking. Biden had taken several falls, prompting his staff to switch to the short stairs on Air Force One and to change Biden's footwear. His walking problems -- another sign of both physical and mental decline -- had become so obviously perilous that Biden clearly needed a wheelchair to get around safely. And that was exactly what the family and staff planned to do… after the first week of November 2024.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“Biden’s steep mental decline, which was apparent to anyone outside the Washington, D.C., media bubble even before his 2020 campaign, did not help his party’s prospects in 2024. But it wasn’t the decisive factor some make it out to be. Trump’s victory was the result of Democratic policies, which wrecked the economy and flooded the nation with 10 million undocumented immigrants, and of cultural progressivism’s toxicity in the woke era…
“The idea that Harris could have won with more time on the trail is equally ridiculous. Her only real momentum came early in the race, and it seeped away with every shallow and off-putting utterance. There’s a reason her handlers wouldn’t allow her to do an interview for the first month of the campaign — they knew what would happen if she were allowed to speak. And they were right. The early polling bump she experienced upon taking over the top of the ticket… evaporated steadily until Election Day.”
Peter Laffin, Washington
