Joe Biden, naked emperor

Sometimes, a fairytale provides the best description of a real-world crisis. That’s true of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. The best description, sadly, is the tale of the naked emperor, who parades through his kingdom without clothes but is never called out until a child cries out the truth. Once the child speaks, the crowd joins in.

For Joe Biden, the yelling child was the split screen that kept his face on camera throughout his late June debate with Donald Trump. Observers could finally see — and call out — what the Biden team and the mainstream press knew for months but refused to say.

In fact, the Biden communications team is still refusing to acknowledge the obvious. How can they and still claim Joe is fit to serve as president for another four-plus years? Their response is, in essence, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?”

Voters believe their own eyes. Polls show a steady decline in support for Biden, which has sunk to the lowest levels for any president since modern polling began. There are two reasons for that dreadful showing: bad outcomes on voters’ top issues — and a grim assessment of Joe’s health.

Voters don’t believe Biden’s debate performance was merely “one bad night.” They are troubled by a significant, long-term decline in his physical and mental condition and uncertain he remains fit for office right now, much less years into the future, and they don’t want to be governed by unelected functionaries.

So far, Biden and his family are digging in, saying he will remain in the race. Frankly, that’s the only stance they can take: To say he is thinking of dropping out would be like the emperor’s turning to the crowd and saying, “For some reason, I feel cold.”

Whatever senior Democrats and the media say, the decision to stay in the race is Joe Biden’s alone. Thanks to his primary victories, he already has enough delegates to win the nomination.

If Biden decided to leave, Democrats would be stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is even less popular than the president. Although there are several stronger candidates, Kamala cannot be passed over without blowing up the party’s coalition, which requires a strong turnout among black voters.

Biden underscored that point when he recently told a Philadelphia radio station that he is “the first black woman” to serve as vice president with a black president. Howlers like that are why Biden’s staff have been handing interviewers a list of questions, discovered after several asked identical questions. We know they give Joe a list of answers; caught out, they agreed to stop.

Voters have seen the problem. Biden can’t solve it by reading speeches from a teleprompter or giving short interviews to friendly local stations. He has to sit down for one-on-one interviews with national reporters. He struggled through one — without major gaffes — for twenty-two minutes with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. But that interview skipped over all the major policy issues.

One interview is not enough. Biden will have to do a lot more — and they can’t all be with friendly interlocutors. He will have to take questions from the White House press corps, not once or twice but frequently. He will have to speak extemporaneously to show he can still think on his own.

Those are the only ways to confront the damning perception that he is too frail and forgetful to continue for several more years. Unfortunately for the president, those perceptions are rapidly becoming fixed. When that happens, perceptions are nearly impossible to reverse.

The mainstream media is in no mood to help him. They have been caught doing that for too long, watching silently as a naked president marched down the street. The press failed in its basic duty to report the truth. Why? Because they are partisan and want a Democrat to defeat Donald Trump.

What changed over the past few weeks? The growing belief that Biden cannot win and that Democrats need someone else atop the ticket. That’s when media finally began reporting troubling stories like Biden’s routinely forgetting the names of long-time friends and being too tired to work outside a truncated schedule of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The mainstream media is an integral part of the Democratic coalition. They all fear that, with Biden atop the ticket, they will lose the House and Senate, as well as the White House. They also fear a second-term Trump presidency would be more effective in dealing with the permanent bureaucracy that stymied him last time. The “permanent government” is closely aligned with the Democratic Party, and they have buried a lot of skeletons in very shallow graves.

Given Biden’s polls numbers and his health, the leaders of this Democratic coalition now appear ready to roll the dice. They figure Kamala Harris can’t be a worse candidate than Biden. They could be wrong, of course, and they can’t force Biden out unless he agrees.

If they do manage to change candidates, the media and Democratic officials will immediately line up behind Harris. They will try their best to get voters to forget that they all stayed silent for months when they could see — but not say — that the aging president had no clothes.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2024 World edition.