The Real Biden Scandal: Running for a Second Term

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There is one last thing that must be said about the effort to cover up Joe Biden’s mental infirmity, not to give the man one last shove out the door but to call attention to what remains an ongoing scandal in American politics. And that is: They were running him for another term.

From this weekend’s “now it can be told”-themed piece in the New York Times:
“They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.

“They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.”

A similarly-timed article in the Guardian relayed an anecdote from political scientist Larry Sabato. A Democratic senator called Sabato in early 2024 and said, “You do realize, off the record, that Joe Biden is not going to be our nominee?” Sabato, stunned, says the senator then told him: “I just was at a meeting with him with several other senators and he couldn’t even function. We can’t run him.”

That senator tried to talking to the administration about it and “was punished, as several of them were. They gave him the cold shoulder for a while. The point is that a lot of people had figured it out but they didn’t care. I’m stunned that they got away with it.”

But we already knew from past reporting that some of this was going on. Over the summer, CNN reported that members of Biden’s Cabinet didn’t know much about his health because they were so rarely given the opportunity to see the president. And of course there was the early-July Wall Street Journal report that came under attack from the media and the president’s administration and allies yet turned out to be exactly right about Biden’s condition and the fact that he was essentially a part-time president. The Journal recounted a 2022 meeting abroad with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the president skipped, even though it was in the early evening, so he could go to bed. The chancellor and his aides didn’t know Biden was flaking on him until Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived and held the meeting in his stead. The president just simply didn’t show

The stand-in part of that is the key. Biden may not have been “presidenting” at various key moments, but someone was.

Now the best you can say for anyone who wasn’t a member of the Biden nuclear family is that perhaps they didn’t know the full extent of it either and were made to respond on the fly. But if Blinken knew in 2022 that the president couldn’t handle an early-evening meeting with Scholz, so did plenty of other people—and nobody said anything for two more years.

Additionally, his administration rallied around him even after he announced he was running for reelection. That is unconscionable. Some of Biden’s term was a patchwork, bullpen-by-committee presidency. Which means a second term would have been an essentially fraudulent one. And from the highest reaches of the American government, officials were barreling forward with an attempt to get Biden a second term that they knew would be managed—perhaps by them—behind the scenes in a way we haven’t seen since Edith Wilson did so 100 years ago.

To react with panicked solidarity and an exhaustive effort in the moment, without orchestrating a way to stop the charade, is bad enough. But to attempt to engineer an entire sham presidential term? That is one heck of a fraud to perpetrate on the American people.