The infirmity of President Joe Biden during his time in office is one of the biggest scandals in American political history. Yet, despite the scale of the cover-up, the biggest fiasco of the Biden presidency was not his poor health and mental state. It was how his administration fully leaned into the “great awokening” despite his campaign message of returning to normalcy.
A report from The New York Times on Tuesday highlighted how Biden ultimately ceded ground to his left flank on issues such as forcing schools to allow men in women’s sports with little opposition despite his trepidation. The former president, who ran as some kind of moderate, barely performed the function of a speed bump to the Left’s desires.
It’s that legacy Democrats and their media enablers will try to make you forget.
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With a chief executive essentially out on a four-year lid, the Left’s political machine worked on autopilot.
They flooded the country with illegal aliens, completely circumventing the laws of our nation and creating a ginormous mess for the succeeding regime to deal with. They pushed DEI into the government. They forced transgender insanity onto K-12 campuses, and Easter was used to celebrate a “Trans Day of Visibility.”
They stumbled and bumbled aimlessly in foreign policy with no more of a strategy than to keep up the narrative that they were fighting for “democracy” against authoritarians while using government tools to silence their domestic opponents.
All this while the president snoozed at the beach.
As a result, Democrats were ultimately swept out of office and fell to their lowest popularity in the history of polling.
However, despite being obviously so far gone, Biden lingers like old cigarette smoke clinging to a jacket. He emerged from the woodwork recently to make a bizarre and stuttering speech that simply reminded everyone about the chasm in energy levels between him and President Donald Trump.
The Left just can’t make this problem go away, even if they want to. Some Democrats are trying to use Biden’s ill health to make excuses for their party’s failures while giving themselves the out that they had no idea Biden was in such bad shape.
A clip that made the rounds this weekend of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., hemming and hawing on a podcast is very much worth watching. She very poorly tried to tell viewers that she was convinced that Biden was just fine until the moment before he dropped out of the election.
This is a setup for the classic George Costanza defense of something not being a lie as long as you believe it.
“Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity, he had a sharpness to him?” podcast host Sam Fragoso asked Warren on Sunday. Fragoso noted that the Massachusetts senator maintained that line right up to the moment Biden dropped out of the race in July.
“I said what I believe to be true,” Warren responded. “I said I had not seen decline and I hadn’t at that point.”
Fragoso looked incredulous and didn’t let the issue go. He asked Warren if Biden was as sharp as herself to which she visibly held back laughter and knew that she was caught in the trap.
As Warren began listing off such impressive Biden feats, such as being “on his feet” and attending meetings, Fragoso interrupted.
“‘On his feet’ is not praise,” Fragoso told Warren. “‘He can speak in sentences is not praise.”
Warren responded, “fair enough.”
Brutal.
This dynamic between the press and Democrats is interesting and perhaps not all that it seems.
Whereas up until the moment of Biden’s catastrophic presidential debate, most legacy and leftwing media were still programmed to say that questions about Biden’s health were right wing conspiracies, they are now actually prodding Democrat politicians if the subject comes up at all.
Don’t think for a moment this is because of some sudden commitment to journalistic integrity or anything like that. When it became clear that Biden was no longer useful and that he had become an outright impediment to the Left’s power, they turned on him.
What’s happening is that the media is going into a phony “mea culpa” mode to in part help Democrats pin their troubles entirely on Biden’s health and lack of energy rather than the Left’s policies and ideology.
The reason Biden’s successor as candidate, former Vice President Kamala Harris, was torched by Trump in the 2024 election, and that nearly every demographic shifted to the right was not just because Biden was a do-nothing president (though that certainly didn’t help).
The issue was that Democrat ideas, their policies, and the cultural values they were foisting on the country were absolutely loathed. They embraced issues like defunding the police and forcing women’s sports leagues to admit biological men. On issue after issue, Democrats supported positions that were massively unpopular with Americans, though massively popular with elite institutions.
Once the legacy media narrative machine really cracked, there was a bottoming out for a Democratic Party that for too long had coasted on its institutional advantages.
Now Democrats are locked into continuing support for those deeply unpopular issues despite some of the craftier members of the party trying to shift the rhetoric, if not the policies.
They are banking on Americans having memory loss, just like Biden, and convincing everyone that the previous president’s failures were an anomaly, that the country hadn’t fallen into a deep malaise that they caused, and that Trump is disrupting a political system that was working smoothly and efficiently with just a bit of trouble at the top.
The media’s gaslighting and Democrat denials about Biden’s health were not the only problem, they were symptoms of a larger issue of America’s elite institutional corruption. Now that the corruption has been exposed to the American people, they are desperately trying to rewrite history.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
