With the forthcoming publication of a new book about former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, hate-Trump media leftists now admit that Biden was, indeed, unfit for the presidency.
One of them is far-left New York Times scribe Michelle Goldberg, who discussed Biden and Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.
Goldberg now says she wished she had called for him to step aside. And Tapper now admits he blew the story of Biden’s obvious cognitive and physical decline. Tapper and Thompson say Biden aides and Democrats covered up Biden’s slide, despite the obvious: Any American with a brain knew Biden was unfit for the presidency in 2020, let alone for a run in 2024.
The decline was so severe, the book avers, that White House aides considered putting Biden in a wheelchair if he defeated President Donald Trump.
Sorry, My Bad
Frighteningly, Goldberg opens by admitting, by omission, she didn’t know Biden was declining.
“In 2022, after I wrote a column arguing that Joe Biden was too old to run for re-election, I had a bunch of conversations and at least one cable TV debate with Democrats who thought I was wrong,” the hate-Trump leftist wrote:
I don’t remember there being much difference between what these Democrats said publicly and privately; I certainly wasn’t hearing off-the-record whispers about Biden’s decline. Instead, officials and pundits I spoke to seemed convinced that it would be crazy for the party to give up the advantages of incumbency, that a primary risked creating nasty fissures among various Democratic factions, and, most relevantly, that Biden’s legislative successes proved he was still up to the job.
Some of them appeared so sure I was mistaken that I wondered if they might be right; these doubts are why, to my shame, I didn’t write another column calling on him to step aside until the next year.
Why someone of Goldberg’s presumed intelligence needed Democrats to explain that Biden was in severe mental decline is inexplicable. That aside, she said the Tapper-Thompson collaboration calls “the widespread refusal to admit how bad he had become a ‘cover-up.’”
“There was certainly some covering up going on, especially among Biden’s insular inner circle,” Goldberg continued. “But more than lying to the public about Biden’s increasing infirmity, I think too many Democrats were lying to themselves.”
Thus, the two authors have done Democrats a favor because the book demands a “reckoning” for the November 5 election that put Donald Trump back in office. A former White House aide, Goldberg explains of a line in the book, “left because he or she didn’t want to see Biden run again.”
“We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline,” the aide told the writers.
But while his closest associates might have hidden the worst of erosion, it was plain enough to anyone willing to see it. Again and again, voters told pollsters that the president was too old to run for re-election. If ordinary people recognized the problem, why couldn’t the insiders?
And why, they wonder, couldn’t Goldberg, who then offers this bizarre assessment of those who worked closely with Biden:
Among those least equipped to recognize the brewing crisis over Biden’s competence, then, may have been those close enough to the White House to be deeply engaged with policy, but not so close that they regularly saw the president in person. Being in Washington gave them lots of insight into legislative sausage-making, but it also trapped them in a bubble, unable to recognize how weak Biden appeared to the public, and how untenable his continuing leadership had become.
The Book
As for the Tapper-Thompson book, based on 200 interviews, Axios has revealed, the authors report that “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election.”
But using a wheelchair during the campaign would be “politically untenable,” Axios reported. Even then, Tapper and Thompson write, “Given Biden’s age, [his physician Kevin O’Connor] also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery.”
That Biden could fall was obvious when First Lady “Dr.” Jill had to help him off the stage after the debate with Trump.
The book also reveals that Biden didn’t recognize fangirl George Clooney at a fundraiser in June 2024. That might explain why Clooney, in the Times, called on Biden to quit the race.
The book is hardly a revelation. One report after another showed that Biden was declining, not least two undercover recordings of administration officials who admitted the president wasn’t all there. In January, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said his interactions with Biden showed that the president wasn’t running the country. Johnson cited a Wall Street Journal report that disclosed just how far Biden had declined mentally. The newspaper said a “diminished Biden [was] in charge.”
Perhaps the worthies of the media got a clue when Biden claimed that cannibals ate his uncle during World War II, or when The New York Times revealed that a Parkinson’s disease specialist visited the White House eight times
Tapper’s Comments to CNN
Touting the book on CNN, Tapper noted that the White House falsely called a video that showed former President Barack Hussein Obama escorting a confused Biden off a stage a “cheap fake.”
“They did this all the time when there was video that seemed to show Biden acting in an odd or unusual, seemingly ‘out of it’ way,” he said.
Importantly, Tapper confessed that he, too, blew the story about Biden’s decline.
“I think some of the criticism is fair, to be honest, of me,” Tapper told CNN colleague John Berman:
Certainly I’m not going to speak for anybody else, but knowing then what I know now, I look back at my coverage during the Biden years and I did cover some of these issues, but not enough. I look back on it with humility.
A Biden fall and spill on his bike “was obviously indicative of something serious that was going on. I think what we learned about the non-functioning Biden rearing his head increasingly — not being able to come up with the name of George Clooney, not being able to come up with the name of top aides in the White House — I think that really reveals something even more significant.” Tapper said.
The mea culpas from Goldberg and Tapper do show one thing: They knew Biden was unfit for the presidency and refused to report it. So they were involved in the cover-up.
H/T: Fox News
