Life isn’t getting any easier for Joe Biden. President Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, and at 82 his prospects must be grim.
Of course, Biden was far from being in good health before this. A new book, Original Sin, explains that his cognitive decline, which was pretty obvious in public, was actually “much worse behind the scenes”.
Biden’s colleagues, according to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, found meeting the president “disturbing and frustrating”. In 2022, he was forgetting the names of key advisors. By 2024, he was “mumbly and incoherent and difficult to understand”. Thank God there wasn’t much happening in the world at the time — just the small matter of wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
In Biden’s administration, Tapper says, America had “an administration where the president [was] so surrounded by people who [would] never tell him anything negative, ever, and in fact [would] block negative stuff from coming to him.”
In 2019, I wrote a jokey article called “The case for locking Joe Biden in a cupboard”, the argument of which was that Biden was well-known and popular but put his foot in it when he spoke. Bizarrely, though, it turns out that as Biden’s health deteriorated, his team did pretty much exactly that. Did they think that he would prevail and recover? Or was the sneaking hope that President Kamala Harris could be installed after the election?
Either way, the White House and its supporters hotly denied that there was anything wrong with the president. A “false narrative” was being spread by “politically motivated” critics, and Biden was in fact “focused” and “sharp”. Actually, President Biden should have been focused on his retirement. His decline was clear — even to British opinion columnists living in Poland — but his colleagues and supporters grimly maintained plausible deniability.
Opponents of President Donald Trump often make a point of emphasising his dishonest nature. This is not a critique that any honest person could dispute. Trump lies as easily as most of us breathe. It is far from clear, in fact, that he knows the distinction between “truth” and “lie”, rather than “convenient” and “inconvenient”.
Trump’s dishonesty, and that of his supporters, helped to fuel the left-leaning craze for analysing “disinformation”. But campaigning for the truth was hollow at best when large-scale falsehoods lay at the heart of the establishment.
Biden’s mental health is not the only example here. It is very obvious that public health authorities misled us during the pandemic — with, for example, Anthony Fauci making a 180-degree turn on masks and shrugging it off with reference to how masks had had to be saved for health care workers.
Or take Afghanistan. American dishonesty, Patrick Porter wrote for The Critic, was marked by “wishful confirmation bias and discouragement of negative feedback”:
From above, determined to demonstrate victories, the White House and Department of Defence reported low US casualty figures as increased stability, rising casualties as part of renewed offensives, a reduction in suicide bombings as increased peace, a rise in suicide bombings as enemy desperation.
It is more understandable, because in war there has to be an element of secrecy, but one could also mention the extent to which, as the New York Times reported, US involvement in Ukraine has continued on a scale “known only to a small circle of American and allied officials”.
Liberals and leftists are not incorrect that populists often lie to undermine trust in the system. Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, are often dishonest or at least disingenuous in order to maintain trust in the system. The goodness of establishment institutions for the people is considered obvious. That people understand those institutions is irrelevant if not actively dangerous.
Sometimes, left-leaning commentators even explicitly advise against expanding knowledge if the conclusions might be politically disruptive, such as when Matt Yglesias advised against investigating the “unseemly” topic of group differences in biology (in fairness, other left-leaning commentators thought Yglesias was seeing a potential controversy where there was none).
What counts is keeping the managerial state on the road. That the president was in severe cognitive decline mattered far less than upholding faith in the policies and institutions that he was representing. Of course, if the president could not even recall the names of his advisers, this suggests that he was contributing little to state policy. Such opaque, unaccountable politics might help to explain the proliferation of the sort of cynicism that makes men like Donald Trump viable candidates. But at least Biden’s administration, in all its secrecy, helped Ukraine to win the war, solved the border crisis and ended violence in the Middle East.
