The Conspiracy to Hide Biden

The five reporters who worked on the story (which is behind a paywall) interviewed some 50 administration officials, staffers, lawmakers, and other insiders.  Even though the general public has long been concerned with President Biden’s age and Republicans have been hammering him over his “senior moments,” most of those interviewed were genuinely surprised to see Biden come unravelled during the debate.  This is because Biden had been essentially hidden away from his own government.

The report begins with an account of President Biden presenting his case for the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill to the House Democratic Caucus.  He spoke disjointedly for half an hour, never getting around to asking the lawmakers to vote for the bill.  So after he was finished, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, obviously frustrated, took the microphone and told the Congressmen she would explain what the president was trying to say.  That was the last time the president spoke to the Democratic Caucus. That was in 2021, three years ago!

We also learn that Biden hardly ever met with his Cabinet members, much less held meetings of the entire Cabinet.  Senior members of the White House staff took care of all of that, we are told, with one official admitting that the president was not engaged in the “hands-on business of governing.”

All the while, those Senior members of the White House staff came down hard on any Democrat who expressed any questions or raised any doubts about Biden’s condition.  They insisted on how sharp Biden was.  To say otherwise, they said, was to play in the hands of the Republicans.

Some Democrats did want a genuine primary contest, with alternative candidates competing with Biden for the presidential bid.  But top party operatives crushed that attempt and manipulated the process–by making South Carolina the first primary, state parties only allowing Biden on the ballot, and threatening to blackball anyone who worked for another candidate– so that running against him was impossible.

When Special Council Robert Hur, investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left office as Vice President, refused to press charges because he was “elderly man with a poor memory,” with “diminished faculties in advancing age,” he was excoriated by White House operatives.  But, according to the story, “Outside of Biden’s core staff and family, he was the only person to the public’s knowledge who had spent such an extended period interviewing the president, spending five hours over two days in October asking Biden detailed questions.”  No one else had been allowed to spend as much time with him!

Even after the debate debacle, as Biden’s decline was impossible to deny and as more and more accounts of his problems were coming out (such as introducing Ukrainian president Zelensky as “President Putin” and referring to “Vice President Trump”), his handlers continued to insist upon his great abilities.  They did so right up to time of the announcement of his withdrawal.  Even that, I would add, kept Biden out of sight, breaking the news in a social media post rather than a televised announcement (as LBJ did) or a press conference.

The story describes a pattern of rationalization and denial:

[Some] say they realize now that they had simply been looking the other way. One longtime donor recalled that on the last three occasions he saw the president, Biden had repeatedly lost his train of thought and interrupted his sentence with “whatever.” The donor didn’t think much of it at the time. “I was probably rationalizing,” he said. “Subconsciously, you’re like—OK, I don’t think I can deal with this reality. What choice do I have? Nobody else is running.”

A Democratic member of the House of Representatives now says this:

“I am really concerned about what we were not told during these months,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) in an interview. “I remain concerned about that—that for whatever reasons, this overprotective, stage-managed kind of operation not only appears to have denied the American people broadly of an understanding of the president’s current situation, but also other elected officials.”

A “stage-managed kind of operation”!  I can understand a loyal staff being “overprotective.” But we live in a democracy, as the Democrats keep telling us, something they say Trump is threatening and that they are vowing to save.  I’d like to learn what decisions Biden’s unelected handlers made for him.  And the nature of the lies they told to hide what they were doing.

But what could have been done?  This is what the 25th Amendment of the Constitution was crafted to deal with, the eventuality that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”  But short of that, those in charge should have at least discouraged President Biden from running for re-election–as they have finally done just weeks before the convention– instead of quashing the very idea.

The Wall Street Journal article describes what happened as “an epic, yearslong miscalculation,”  “a story of allies eager to look the other way, Biden advisers who worked to stamp out doubts about his vigor and a party apparatus that boxed out alternative candidates.”

Charles C. W. Cooke calls it something else:  “This was a conspiracy, perpetrated by the White House against the public, some parts of the press, the broader Democratic Party, and Congress.”

Photo: President Biden Makes Infrastructure Announcement by Marc A. Hermann / MTA  via Flickr,  CC by 2.0