Yesterday, we considered the farce of Congresswoman Kay Granger (R‑Tex.), serving out her term from an assisted living home — suffering, her family says, from “dementia issues.”
So, today, let’s discuss the donkey in the room: the president of these United States, one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.
“Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public,” explains a major exposé in the Wall Street Journal.
How “throughout”? Almost from day one: “a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on,” notes The Journal, “in just the first few months of his term.”
The reportage confirms what we suspected. “The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.”
This structure also served to cover for Biden’s most characteristic failing, “foot-in-mouth”: his hand-holders sought “to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.”
Not a morning person, the staff concocted an elaborate schedule of afternoon meetings which they tried to keep very short. “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether.”
Perhaps most importantly, “[t]he strategies to protect Biden largely worked,” the report reminds, “until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump.”
Luckily, the Washington cabal has not quite figured out a way to have a president as figure-head only and keep the deception from the American electorate.
But too close for comfort.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Managing the President: 2021 – 2024”
A genuine secret was not exposed on 27 June; Biden’s impairment had been an open secret, which is to say that people maintained some pretense of ignorance. On 27 June, the pretense became unsustainable for very nearly all of the previous participants.
Not much later, someone with control of Biden’s X account called for Harris to be nominated, making her displacement very awkward, and so a new pretense was begun.
But the Washington cabal had help from the White House Press Corps. and from most members of Congress. Biden’s handlers could never have done what they did during the 2020 campaign or his presidency without an accommodating press. His decline was evident months before the 2020 election. Social media shut down all dissenting views. The Washington cabal wasn’t acting alone.
My 2020 entries on Facebook about Biden’s impairment vanished from my history; they do not appear in searches nor in the daily list of entries from years prior.