Biden’s Legacy Will Be His Mental Decline
When does partisan allegiance become elder abuse?
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
Dec. 24, 2024 4:17 pm ET
Remember when Robert Hur took pity on President Biden and caught hell for it?
For anyone who’s forgotten, Mr. Hur was the special counsel tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Mr. Biden’s pre-presidential handling of classified documents, some of which had been stored in the garage and basement of the president’s Wilmington, Del., home.
Following an inquiry that included more than five hours of interviews with Mr. Biden over two days, Mr. Hur released a 345-page report of his investigation in February. It concluded that Mr. Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” Nevertheless, Mr. Hur determined that “no criminal charges are warranted.” Why? In part because a jury would be unlikely to convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
Democrats and their media pals were relieved that Mr. Biden wouldn’t face charges, but they bristled at Mr. Hur’s descriptions of the president’s declining mental state. “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse” than in his recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017, Mr. Hur reported. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Vice President Kamala Harris said the revelations were “politically motivated,” and Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania called them a “big nothing burger.” The press should know better than to blame the messenger, but that didn’t stop Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus from accusing Mr. Hur of overstepping his bounds—“Excuse me. Is Hur a lawyer or a geriatrician? What’s his expertise in making this damaging assessment?”—and insisting that his “portrayal of Biden as a doddering old man is inconsistent with what I hear from those who have frequent interactions with him.”
Perhaps no one beclowned himself more than MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who offered a blanket denunciation of anyone who dared to challenge the president’s soundness of mind and ability to serve a second term. The cable host explained that he’d known Mr. Biden for years and that the president had, if anything, grown sharper with age. “I’m about to tell you the truth,” he told his viewers. “And f— you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
Subsequent revelations have been much kinder to Mr. Hur than to his detractors. But we’ve also learned that Mr. Biden’s partisan enablers weren’t only misleading the public about the president’s condition. The White House staff was also misleading the president himself. Before he dropped out the race, Mr. Biden repeatedly bickered with reporters about the accuracy of polls. In November 2023, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed him trailing Donald Trump in most key states. And although other polls released around the same time showed the same results, the president seemed in complete denial.
It happened again after Mr. Biden’s fateful debate performance in June. In a desperate effort to convince Americans that he was still up to the job, Mr. Biden sat for an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. When Mr. Stephanopoulos, citing recent survey data, told Mr. Biden that he wasn’t only trailing but had fallen “further behind by any measure,” the president was perplexed. “You guys keep saying that,” Mr. Biden replied.
Mr. Stephanopoulos explained that Mr. Biden’s job-approval rating had dropped to the mid-30s and that the percentage of voters who thought he was too old to serve had doubled since 2020. Over and over, Mr. Biden disputed the numbers. “Do you really believe you’re not behind right now?” asked Mr. Stephanopoulos. “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up,” Mr. Biden answered.
Like Mr. Hur, the president may well have been telling the truth. Last week, the Journal reported that Mr. Biden’s closest aides and advisers have spent the past four years trying to hide his impairments. Mr. Biden’s handlers limited his interactions with cabinet members and lawmakers, scripted his infrequent media appearances, and filtered his access to information. “Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president,” according to the paper. “The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.”
It’s an epic scandal whose scope we are only beginning to appreciate. And it may turn out to be the Biden administration’s chief legacy. When does partisan allegiance become elder abuse?
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