President Joe Biden’s handlers should have known what would happen if they sent him out to debate Donald Trump at 9 p.m.
Because of worsening dementia and severely compromised physical and cognitive abilities, he would come off as the frail, elderly man he is.
And now, aides have confirmed the mistake. The debate at that hour was a mistake because Biden starts shutting down at 4 p.m, they told Axios.
In other words, they strongly suggested that Biden was sundowning, a symptom of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
It it time, as Legal Insurrection’s William Jacobson wrote after the debate, to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Biden from office? He is a major national security threat if he can’t function after 4 p.m.
The Report
“The past 36 hours showcased two Joe Bidens: the veteran president rallying voters in a swing state, and an 81-year-old man struggling to string thoughts together in a debate,” the Axios report began.
Biden is carefully “stage-managed,” including his “sleep schedule” and aides’ walking him to Marine One. Though aides “usually see him engaged,” the rumble with Trump “shattered the White House’s efforts to show Biden at his best: a president capable of serving until 2029, when he’d be 86,” Axios continued.
Though he seemed to have recovered the following day during a speech in North Carolina, “Biden’s miscues and limitations are more familiar inside the White House,” the report explained:
The time of day is important as to which of the two Bidens will appear.
From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.
Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.
Thursday’s 90-minute debate began at 9pm ET.
Afterward, CNN’s cameras captured First Lady Jill Biden gingerly helping her husband descend the few stairs by the podium.
The White House is in full-denial mode. Biden is fine, they say. But Thursday’s debate showed otherwise — and they know it.
Americans likely saw Biden during “sundowning” — the late day confusion and personality changes in dementia sufferers.
“Sundowning is increased confusion that people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia may experience from dusk through night,” the Alzheimer’s Association says:
Also called “sundowner’s syndrome” it is not a disease but a set of symptoms or dementia-related behaviors that may include difficulty sleeping, anxiety, agitation, hallucinations, pacing and disorientation.
During the debate, Biden experienced at least three of the factors that can contribute to sundowning:
- Mental and physical exhaustion from a full day of activities.
- Navigating a new or confusing environment.
- A mixed-up “internal body clock.” The person living with Alzheimer’s may feel tired during the day and awake at night.
Note again, as Axios reported, that Biden is so “stage-managed” that even his sleep schedule is controlled.
Other Symptoms
Biden’s decline also showed at the recent G7 meeting in Italy, where he strangely saluted Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, as The New American reported. And he wandered off from the other leaders during a parachute demonstration.
In early June, The Wall Street Journal reported that myriad sources say that Biden is “slipping.” The report contained more stories about his memory problems, such as thinking he was vice president during the China Virus panic.
Aside from needing cheat sheets during meetings or speeches that give him detailed instructions in capital letters, as The New American reported two years ago (a sign that even then his memory was failing), Biden is also given to false memories, another sign of dementia.
Consider the list:
- Biden said that cannibals on Papua New Guinea ate his World War II aviator uncle, whose aircraft crashed near the island nation;
- He has repeatedly claimed his son, Beau, died in Iraq. In fact, he died at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland;
- Biden has claimed he was a civil rights activist who helped desegregate theaters and restaurants;
- He claimed he was a long-haul truck driver;
- When a ship departing the port of Baltimore crashed into and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March, Biden claimed he had traveled across the bridge by train many times. The bridge had no train tracks;
- Also during that interview, he forgot when his son, Beau, died.
Other signs of dementia, as retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said, are Biden’s inappropriate rages and behavior in public. They include his reaction to special counsel Robert Hur’s claim that Biden couldn’t remember when Beau died.
Carson also pointed to Biden’s fury at a reporter who asked if he would take a cognitive test.
“That’s so typical of people in the early stages of decline to become aggressive and defensive about who they are,” Carson said.
Time for the 25th Amendment?
Thus did Jacobson rightly conclude that Biden is a major national security risk, and that his Cabinet must invoke the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of a president who cannot do the job.
“Democrats need to put aside whether Biden is up to the task of being a successful nominee,” he wrote. “No honest person who watched last night’s debate can think that Biden mentally is up to the job of being President.”
“Can you imagine an emergency situation where immediate military decisions that only a president can make need to be made in seconds or minutes, and the military having to go to diminished Joe for a decision?” he asked.
And imagine if the military needed that decision after 4 p.m.
