President Joe Biden’s catch-and-release policies for illegal immigration that caused a historic invasion of the United States was the first scandal of his presidency, but it was his catastrophic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that destroyed his public standing and pushed him permanently into disapproval.
These pages noted at the time that Biden’s mental capacity was slipping and that his diminished ability to remember key facts may have cost the lives of many Afghan civilians and 13 American service members.
At a White House press conference days before those 13 soldiers were killed, Biden falsely claimed that al-Qaida had been driven out of Afghanistan entirely, and the White House was forced to retract this nonsense just hours later. Biden also falsely claimed that there was “no indication” that Americans stuck in Kabul “haven’t been able to get” to the airport, a vacuous statement rebutted by news outlets within minutes. The president was clearly losing his grip on reality.
We are now learning that it was not just outside observers such as the Washington Examiner that were worried about Biden drifting off into la la land. The Wall Street Journal has revealed that as early as spring 2021, the start of his presidency, national security officials admitted to each other that Biden “has good days and bad days,” often causing key national security meetings to be canceled.
Biden notoriously ignored the advice of his generals on Afghanistan. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), then the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, tried to get to Biden personally to get him to attend to reality but now says he was denied access to the president. He contrasted this with his access to former President Barack Obama, even when he was, himself, a much lower-ranking committee member. Similarly, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) of the House Intelligence Committee now discloses that while he engaged Obama personally many times on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “I really had no personal contact” with Biden.
Biden’s diminished mental capacity was clear not only to White House staff members and Democratic lawmakers. For example, he repeatedly confused former British Prime Minister Theresa May with the long-dead Margaret Thatcher; he said Democrats would “take back” the House of Representatives in 2022, when they already controlled it; he blanked on the most famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence and shouted mid-speech, “You know, you know — the thing!”; he mistakenly called Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin his secretary of state; and he invited a woman who had been dead for eight weeks to join him onstage at an event. Biden’s access to Air Force One had to be modified because he kept falling as he tried to climb on board. He also fell off his bike in front of reporters in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He has wandered around lost onstage repeatedly after delivering speeches. The list of semi-geriatric goofs is endless.
They cannot be dismissed as minor flubs. Biden twice claimed that the U.S. would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, which was a radical departure from actual policy, and White House staff had sheepishly to correct him.
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All this time, elected Democratic Party officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), vigorously claimed Biden was just fine, and hacks in the news media endorsed their lies and lobbed accusations of bias at those who preferred to believe their lying eyes and ears. The Democratic Party’s media allies, particularly MSNBC and CNN, attacked the credibility of anyone who noted Biden’s mental freefall, saying they, we, were spreading “misinformation” and “cheap fakes.”
But Democrats surveying the landscape in the aftermath of defeat and just a few weeks before Biden shuffles off into belated retirement are now more willing to admit the truth. We expect we are just beginning to learn how bad Biden’s mental state was throughout his time in office and how far Democratic officials and their media allies went to cover it up. Our advice to them all is to come clean. But we won’t hold our breath waiting.