Joe Biden, America’s oldest president, is getting worse for the wear, especially as international crises tick up under his watch and as the 2024 Presidential Election cycle gets underway.
For years, President Joe Biden has been dogged by rumors and accusations that he’s senile.
We’ve been told it is ageist to even think this way. Or that a lifelong stutter is to blame for the public displays of what many think are signs of senility. But Biden’s handlers are going to find it increasingly difficult to cover up the fact that the forty-sixth president’s age is showing.
Joe Biden: Dazed-and-Confused For So Long
Back in the summer, on the heels of confusing the War in Ukraine with the War in Iraq twice in the same week, the president was seen wandering aimlessly around the set of Nicole Wallace’s MSNBC program after having conducted a softball interview with the president.
These actions are not happening in a vacuum.
They aren’t typical missteps or mispronunciations of the kind that afflicted former Republican President George W. Bush, whose verbal gaffes in public were legendary.
This is part of a disturbing pattern. From falling up the stairs to Air Force one, collapsing off a stationary bike in Delaware, sliding down some stairs while at a state visit in Japan, or slipping on a flat stage at the recent Air Force Academy graduation, President Joe Biden has displayed an astonishing ineptitude at balancing himself. It might not be signs of dementia.
It is, however, signs of old age getting the better of a president.
The man is 80 years old. A fall could cripple him. More ominously, it might kill him, creating a new round of political squabbles to tear this country apart even more than it already is.
Consider this sobering statistic: one-in-three adults aged 50 and over die within 12 months of suffering a hip fracture. I understand that, as president, Biden has access to the world’s best healthcare.
Nevertheless, the negative aspects of advanced age cannot be defeated with present medical technology. And the strain that any president is under only adds to the possibility that something catastrophic may happen to him.
Let’s take a look at Biden’s mental state. When stressed, he is known to snap at people, whether they be aides or reporters. Biden constantly stammers and appears, at times, to be dazed-and-confused.
Infamously, Biden became so confused after giving a rambling, borderline incoherent speech, that he got lost on stage, extended his hand, and then shook the hand…of someone who was not there. He shook hands with thin air. This has happened more than once.
Biden often confuses people and places, too.
He calls upon people who are long dead to stand up and take a bow. Meanwhile, Biden often does not know where he is. If Donald Trump—or any Republican leader, for that matter—exhibited such consistent displays that aligned with the symptoms of age-related cognitive decline, there’d be calls for that individual’s removal from office or impeachment.
Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
In fact, after Trump misspoke in public a few times, at the height of the Democratic Party’s seemingly endless witch hunt against Trump, there were calls to have the forty-fifth president removed under the twenty-fifth amendment by claiming that he was cognitively impaired.
There is a famous music video that was made during the 2020 Presidential Election Cycle in which clips from Trump’s interview with Fox News medical expert, Dr. Marc Siegel, were edited together to make a hilarious song called “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV,” by the group Remix Bros on YouTube.
Those clips, though, are from an interview that the forty-fifth president gave because he was receiving such flak in the press about the possibility that he was suffering from dementia. Trump took a cognitive test and talked proudly about having passed the test.
The whole reason this came about, though, was because of media and Democrat (one-in-the-same these days) pressure placed upon Trump over what were a few instances of curious behavior in public.
Biden does behavior like that on a daily basis.
Is he forced to take cognitive tests and then report the findings to vicious reporters? No. Are viral videos made mocking those tests? Of course not.
Biden is America’s Chernenko
We’re told we’re bigots if we dare to question the mental fitness of the forty-sixth president. Like the citizens of the Soviet Union in its final days on this Earth, we have a party man as leader; an American version of Konstantin Chernenko, and we are told to accept and adore his “leadership” as though he were truly a great man—or else.
Shockingly, many people are doing as they are told. Notably those who are public figures and are beholden to favorable press to continue moving their careers along. Everyone with something to lose if Biden is revealed to be in cognitive decline is zealously guarding the man from even the smallest of questions from the friendliest of media outlets.
Which, of course, brings us back to the Nicole Wallace interview during the Summer. Seated next to the MSNBC host, Biden engaged in a softball interview. She was wrapping up the interview, giving some closing small talk with the president, who appeared utterly uninterested and looked somewhat lost.
Biden began to get antsy, clearly unwilling to engage in small-talk, and waited around for the last few seconds as the commercial break neared. Rather than sit silently as most public figures know to do while waiting for the camera to turn off, Biden skyrocketed from his seat while Wallace was still speaking on-air, and then walked off, looking lost.
While it isn’t the scandal that many social media personalities on the Right want to make of it, when placed in the larger context of Biden’s bizarre behavior, it doesn’t make the forty-sixth president look good.
Moreover, Biden’s weird actions don’t give the public any sense of reassurance. Going into what will be a contentious presidential election cycle, that’s not good for the Democrats.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
