The Biden administration was a disaster that set the country back years. Most of that can be attributed to former President Joe Biden, but his disastrous collection of Cabinet officials should not avoid scrutiny.
Three Biden Cabinet officials have revealed they were aware of just how bad Biden’s cognitive decline was in office. After apparently being granted anonymity by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson for their book on the subject, one Cabinet secretary revealed he or she was “shocked” by Biden’s condition at a rare Cabinet meeting, saying Biden’s mouth was “agape” and he was “disoriented.” That secretary said the Cabinet “didn’t have access to him” for “months.” A second said their access dropped off as his presidency continued, with Cabinet secretaries having to communicate with Biden through only his aides. A third said Biden could only give the country “four to six good hours a day,” at least in between all his days off in Delaware.
It is safe to say that everyone in Biden’s Cabinet knew Biden wasn’t playing with a full deck, meaning they all helped perpetuate the fraud to the public that Biden was fine and was indeed fit to run for president again in 2024. CNN reported in July 2024 that Biden’s team was basically staging Cabinet meetings on the rare occasion Biden held them, with one source saying, “They would come and say, ‘Hey, the president is going to call on you about 25 minutes in and ask this question. What are the bullet points you’ll respond with?’” One secretary at the time even said he or she didn’t know if Biden was fine or not because he almost never met with him or her.
The four-year cover-up of Biden’s health (or five years in the case of Antony Blinken, a Biden adviser during his campaign who ended up becoming Biden’s secretary of state) is only part of how Biden’s Cabinet set the country back years. For example, take former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is likely one of the anonymous sources in some of these reports and who is almost certainly running for president in 2028.
Buttigieg became transportation secretary with no real experience other than serving as the mayor of a city of just over 100,000 people. It was an obvious favor for Buttigieg after he dropped out in 2020 to endorse Biden, a DEI token appointment (the first openly gay Cabinet secretary!), and a resume builder for Buttigieg’s eventual run for president.
Buttigieg’s tenure could only be described as a train wreck. That is not some kind of metaphor. Buttigieg was infamously silent for 10 days after a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which led to an environmental crisis and evacuations. He was also missing in action during the supply chain crisis, having disappeared for two months on paternity leave while ports were backed up.
Buttigieg was not the only Cabinet secretary to disappear without notice. Former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin disappeared without notifying Biden or just about anyone else that he was hospitalized for complications relating to prostate cancer. Austin was medicated to the point that it could affect his cognitive abilities before he even transferred his authority to his deputy, who also was not told about his condition. She was on vacation in Puerto Rico when Austin was hospitalized.
Earlier this month, the Washington Post revealed that a hotline “connecting air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport and their counterparts at the Pentagon” had been “inoperable” since March 2022. This news comes after a crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk in January, which killed 67 people, the deadliest U.S. air disaster since 2001. That hotline was supposed to be maintained by the Defense Department, which was run by Austin, but was seemingly ignored for two years. The Federal Aviation Administration, under Buttigieg’s Transportation Department, was completely unaware that the line was down for over two years.
The country is still cleaning up after the mess of multiple Cabinet secretaries beyond Buttigieg and Austin. Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was an unmitigated failure at his post, letting millions of illegal immigrants flow into the country. The Trump administration has shown how easy it is to stop that flow, dropping the number from 100,000-200,000 illegal border crossings per month under Biden and Mayorkas to about 12,000 per month. The big news on immigration under Trump has been the deportation raids against career criminal illegal immigrants across the country, who were allowed to stay in the country under Mayorkas.
Mayorkas also oversaw the Secret Service, which nearly let Trump be assassinated after a catastrophic security failure at a summer rally in Pennsylvania during the campaign. Mayorkas burned through $1.4 billion in funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that he used for illegal immigrants, all while FEMA, under his watch, devolved into a politically biased agency in hurricane recovery.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland did lasting damage to the Justice Department’s credibility, having the department launch partisan crusades against voter ID laws, treating pro-life activists like terrorists, and overseeing the FBI’s targeting of Catholics. Garland, more than anyone in Biden’s Cabinet, was also an active participant in the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline. He slow-rolled the release of the transcript of Biden’s interview with then-special counsel Robert Hur and repeatedly blocked the release of the audio of that interview, knowing how bad Biden sounded, under the cockamamie excuse that people would use the audio to make artificial intelligence manipulations with Biden’s voice.
If anyone challenges Garland’s role in the cover-up of Biden’s condition, it would be Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As mentioned earlier, Blinken was an adviser to Biden’s campaign, meaning he has no excuse not to have noticed Biden’s deteriorating cognitive abilities before he became president. Blinken also did untold damage to America’s standing and credibility on the world stage, getting rolled by Russia, China, and terrorist organizations at every possible opportunity. The world’s impression of the United States under Biden and Blinken is that the country has no bark and even less bite, which helps explain the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Russia’s war with Ukraine, and Hamas’s assault on Israeli civilians.
Biden’s DEI Cabinet was a collection of failures, which have set the country back years on foreign policy, transportation, and safety. Combine that with the cover-up they all took part in that was the biggest American political scandal in decades, and you have a Cabinet in which nearly every member was failing at his or her job while every single one of them was lying to the public about the president being able to perform his job.
Worse, still, is that several members of this Cabinet promise to stick around in our politics for years to come. Buttigieg will be running for president, and former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is considering running as well. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra is running for governor of California, and doing so with a campaign that is even more left-wing than current Gov. Gavin Newsom. They will all bring not just the incompetence they had on the job, but their contempt for voters, proven by their willingness to lie to them for their own political gains.
Biden did plenty of damage to the country with his arrogance and incompetence, but he did plenty more with his selection of sycophants to fill his Cabinet, regardless of their real qualifications. Biden’s Cabinet is one of the worst assembled in modern politics, and the country will be reckoning with the consequences of Biden’s picks for the foreseeable future.