The Biden administration worked hard to conceal the president’s declining mental faculties. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the authorities running Biden’s campaign — those who knew him “up close and personal” — largely confined him to the basement. They did so to conceal what John Hinderaker referred to as Biden’s “dementia,” both during the 2020 campaign and after he became president.
In 2021, we were contacted by NewsGuard to ask why we “ma[d]e this claim without providing credible evidence that he has dementia[.]” The evidence of our eyes was apparently not deemed “credible evidence.” It was a Groucho Marx moment.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre daily press briefings became a daily exercise in deception. She took up the NewsGuard theme. We were not to trust trust the evidence of our eyes. “I can’t even keep up with him,” Jean-Pierre told CNN in June 2022.
When Biden called out to the dearly departed Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski at an event partly in her honor in 2022 — “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? She must have gone out — she must not be here” — Jean-Pierre “explained” that Walorski was “top of mind” because of her recent passing.
She had to be kidding us. Biden’s inner circle can’t have believed that Biden was of sound mind. They had to plan around his physical and mental infirmities every day and explain them away to the public.
Yesterday Politico Playbook reported on the April 2024 memo to Biden from his “Senior Advisors” telling him not to wait for the autumn dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates — the first of which, they noted, was scheduled after mail-in ballots would start going out — but instead to arrange a head-to-head with Trump within a matter of weeks.
The memo was obtained by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, in connection with their campaign book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. Their book is published today. Politico posted the six-page memo here.
The Playbook reporters quote the memo and make a salient point about its form:
“By holding the first debate in the spring, YOU will be able to reach the widest audience possible,” Biden’s top aides told him — and by the way, every reference to Biden is written in attention-grabbing all-caps and bold — “before we are deep in the summer months with the conventions, Olympics and family vacations taking precedence. In addition, the earlier YOU are able to debate the better, so that the American people can see YOU standing next to Trump and showing the strength of YOUR leadership, compared to Trump’s weakness and chaos.”
In the memo’s introductory paragraph, “YOU” and “YOUR” appear in capitalized form four times. “YOU” and “YOUR” appear some 30 times in the six-page memo.
You’ve heard of the royal “we.” This is the demented “YOU.” It helped Biden distinguish himself from his “Senior Advisors” who made the recommendation of an early debate.
The memo bears a family resemblance to the cheat sheet Biden accidentally displayed with instructions telling him in minute detail what to do at a June 2022 meeting with wind industry executives: “YOU take YOUR seat…YOU give brief comments (2 minutes)…YOU ask Liz Shuler, President, AFL-CIO, a question…YOU thank participants… YOU depart.” Easy does it.
How to read the memo? It memo raises the question whether deception led to self-deception or whether Biden’s “Senior Advisors” had perhaps had their fill of their demented boss. Dear readers, I leave further interpretation of the memo in YOUR capable hands.
