Details of Biden’s mental stumbles having real-world impacts now

Americans were witnesses during Joe Biden’s tenure as president to his verbal and mental stumbles, his memory lapses and awkward gaps that moved far beyond his legacy of gaffes and verbal bumbles, even his physical trips and falls.

None of which is out of the ordinary for an octogenarian who now has been described by a federal prosecutor as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” who apparently even forgot when he was vice president to Barack Obama.

But the Wall Street Journal has released a report charging that there was an unprecedented conspiracy to hide Biden’s failings from the public, even as his shortcomings were evidence at the outset of his presidency.

Republican pundit Scott Jennings has described the situation, of presidential aides withholding press access to Biden, of withholding information from the president, and more, a “scandal of epic proportions.”

Reportedly a vocal coach had been hired to try to make Biden’s voice better, and aides “scrapped meetings on Biden’s ‘bad days’ and even kept him away from his own Cabinet appointees and congressional Democratic allies,” according to a multiple reports.

“It’s the biggest scandal in America,” Jennings said during an interview this week.

“And the level and volume of people who dedicated themselves to lying to everyone at home about this man’s condition for four straight years – up through this summer – is breathtaking.”

Fair would be the question, he said, “Who is running this country?”

“And his staff and the White House lied about it and kept it from the American people. It’s an absolute scandal what’s going on.”

The White House has rejected the charge there was a large scale coverup of Biden’s failings.

But a report from the Daily Caller News Foundation explained Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky is warning Democrats could face their own “tea party” movement after the revelations about administration appointees concealing the truth about Biden’s condition.

The report said the Wall Street Journal reporting charged White House aides “insulated” Biden, even from Cabinet members, from the first year of his presidency. Roginsky said that the “lying” about Biden’s health would have consequences for Democrats, the report warned.

“There is a bigger problem here, and that is that I think Democrats are at the point where Republicans might have been right after the Bush election or after the Bush term was up, which is that I think Democrats are starting to mistrust their institutions. And this goes back to a bipartisan effort to lie us into the Iraq war, not just by George Bush, but also by a lot of Democrats.”

Roginsky said, “I think you have a lot of Democrats now, me included, who are pretty sick of the institution and trusting people in the institution and this is just one example, the most recent example, I think of people institutionally lying to the American people and what you’re ultimately going to see. And I don’t have a problem saying this as a Democrat, is that you’re going to see a tea party version rise up in the Democratic Party based on the fact that this is yet another marker of people just not trusting our leaders anymore. And I’m sorry to say that, but I think we brought this on ourselves.”

Biden’s blunders long have been documented in media reports and there’s even been a book written about them. But during his presidency he several times claimed to have spoken with people who were dead at the time.

The report said that includes when he claimed “to have spoken with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and former French President Francois Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996. In September 2022, Biden asked for Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana at a conference on hunger that took place several weeks after Walorski and two staffers were killed in a car crash.”

The real world ramifications now are appearing, too. The Daily Mail said Kamala Harris “abruptly” canceled a scheduled Christmas vacation after the revelations of Biden’s decline.

Social media did not miss the connection, as “Her announcement came hours after a bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation exposed how frail the president has been throughout the last four years.”

The public saw evidence of Biden’s decline when he appeared in a presidential debate with now President-elect Donald Trump last summer. Only days later, Biden dropped out of the race, and endorsed stand-in Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in a landslide in November.

Evidence showed up multiple times over Biden’s presidency, including when he was given written instructions by his staff on where and when to sit during a meeting with press, and when to leave. He also was seen wandering around on stages at various times, seemingly unable to find stairs to get down.

The New York Post said the campaign to hide Biden’s “apparent mental decline” began on Day 1 of his presidency.

“The lack of access to the nation’s oldest-ever president has been well known in Washington — with Biden hosting the fewest large press conferences in modern history and frequently descending into gaffes at the podium when he appeared — but how much the White House made up for the haziness had until now been hidden, according to aides, Democratic lawmakers and donors who spoke with the Wall Street Journal,” the report said.

Further, staff members “removed negative reports from Biden’s stack of news for the day, misleading him about the public’s opinion of his job performance — which reached a 70-year low in 2024,” the report said.

He frequently “relied on notecards,” was seen carrying “large directions printed for him,” and often “missed up the names of foreign dignitaries.”

Mediaite listed the “five biggest bombshells” from the report on Biden, including that there were concerns even during the first part of his tenure, that Democrats noticed a leadership vacuum, that meetings were strictly scripted, that Biden struggled to prepare his thoughts when interviewed by special counsel Robert Hur and campaign donors were “shocked” by his performance on calls.

But the Daily Mail post a list of dozens of events that should, to an observer, cause alarm about a sitting president.

For example. Biden repeatedly stumbled while walking up steps to Air Force One. And fell off bicycles.

He also mislabeled the Royal Air Force the “RFA.” And he fell asleep while listening to speakers at a climate conference.

Several times he mispronounced the names of other nations’ officials.

And, the report said, he “tripped as he walked down the stairs of the Itsukushima Shrine in May 2023 in his rush to greet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.”

And he fell while making an appearance at the Air Force Academy.

And he repeated an inaccurate story about a “white supremacist rally” – twice at the same event.

At a meeting with Brazil’s president, he walked off the stage and into a flag. And he called the Congressional Hispanic Caucus the “black caucus.”

He claimed to have ridden a train over a collapse bridge that never had train tracks, and called Ukraine’s president by the name of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

When Biden forgot the name of his own Defense secretary he simply labeled him a “black man.”