In the aftermath of the worst debate performance by an incumbent president in American history, the media is already scrambling for a storyline about what went wrong with their chosen candidate. Their frame of argument goes like this: we love Joe Biden, he’s the best, his presidency is an enormous success, but really, someone at the White House should have told us that he was this ludicrously old. How were we to know? Shame on them.
This narrative is a blatant lie. The truth is that if the media conglomerates had been honest with the voters a year ago, they would not be in this predicament today, nor would the country be saddled with an mentally addled, barely ambulatory octogenarian as the candidate of the major party media members overwhelmingly support.
The reaction to the debate performance was instantaneous and direct: CNN’s John King saying his phone had blown up like never before, MSNBC acting as if they were discussing if an old dog needs to be put down, the pages of the reliably sycophantic New York Times, Washington Post and Atlantic wallowing in grief and despair, the only silver lining a desperate insistence from Canadian David Frum that Trump shouldn’t have ever been allowed on the stage. The pieces have different bylines but they all follow that same pattern: Joe Biden is a great man, he’s a great president, but it pains me to say it, he’s got to go.
This is, of course, another lie. Biden has definitely not been a great or even a good president. Household net worth is up by 0.7 percent during Biden’s three-year tenure, while it was up 16 percent at this point during Trump’s. Biden has presided over the biggest foreign policy debacle in the Afghanistan exit that the United States has experienced in years, pairing massive foreign policy bungles with a military that has decreased significantly in its readiness. His radical approach to culture war issues has shocked those who knew him as a centrist in the past, particularly on issues related to abortion, trans medical treatments and Title IX. And then, there’s the utter humanitarian disaster of the border, where Biden’s approach of undoing everything Trump did led to a crisis so significant that he had to reinstall multiple policies via executive order.
When Joe Biden leaves office, whenever that is, he’ll be remembered not as a president who healed the nation but as one who sold Americans a false bill of goods. But now he can’t even sell anymore. The striking thing about the CNN debate is that the moderators, while generally fair, absolutely teed things up as softballs for the president on multiple occasions, asking him questions where his answers should have been straightforward and easy. There were no gotchas for him — this was tee-ball. But he failed to connect, over and over again, meandering and even descending into name-calling and falsely boasting about his golf skills (note, for the most surreal moment of the night, that it’s Biden who brought that up).
Decline is a choice — and a choice in this case that the media decided en masse to defend as a-OK to the American people, hoping against hope that no one would catch on. But you can only claim videos are “cheap fakes” when they aren’t happening live on TV in front of your face. As much as the spin might be that responsibility for this moment falls on the Biden family, Jill in particular, the media cannot be allowed to escape the fact that without their constant water-carrying and the lies they told on his behalf, Joe Biden would not currently be the presumptive nominee of their party. They could have done something different. They didn’t. Now they may be stuck with the pain of a reality they created. Look in the mirror Joe and Mika: it’s no one’s fault but your own.
