Unlike you-know-who, Joe Biden did not duck out of his D-Day duties last Thursday. But was he really all there? The videos suggest that he was not.
At one of the main ceremonies, the 81-year-old Commander-in-Chief attempted to sit down at the wrong moment, then changed his mind.
His wife, First Lady Jill, put her hand in front of her mouth to whisper something urgent to her ailing husband, to no avail. The Leader of the Free World stood motionless — locked in a semi-squat — for several excruciating seconds.
It was just one of several seriously senior moments throughout the day. As French president Emmanuel Macron stood about glad-handing the hero veterans, Jill led her husband off-stage by the hand. And when Joe did have a chance to sit down, he appeared to doze off.
Donald Trump‘s son, Donald Jnr, wasted no time in calling Biden ‘an embarrassment’ — and, while no decent person should mock the elderly, it’s hard to disagree.
Joe Biden holds a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on November 13, 2023
On Monday, Biden followed up with yet another painful senile episode. Celebrating ‘Juneteenth’, the ultra-woke federal holiday he signed into law to celebrate the end of slavery, he appeared to freeze once again, his gaze a million miles away for several awful seconds as people danced around him.
It’s all so awkward. The President has spent three years suffering these humiliations on the world stage — and he’s only getting worse. His campaign team often accuse their enemies of manipulating the footage to make him seem more gaga than he is. But there is no denying that Joe gives them plenty of humiliating material with which to work.
Worse, as November 5, the day of the presidential election, draws closer, and his schedule inevitably becomes more gruelling, the President’s decline appears to be fast accelerating at just the wrong time.
As a result, his re-election campaign is getting more and more ugly to watch. He is now experiencing what Shakespeare called the ‘second childishness and mere oblivion’ that accompany a man’s final years.
According to White House doctors, Biden suffers from ‘significant spinal arthritis’, which increasingly impedes his movement. That’s why he wears thick-soled black trainers to assist his mobility. It’s also why Biden’s handlers are desperate to minimise the amount of time the President is seen moving on his own.
His press conferences are tightly stage-managed and the White House now has a PR protocol whereby several of the President’s entourage walk as slowly as they can alongside him as he shuffles glacially across the lawn between the White House and Marine One, the presidential helicopter. The idea is to stop yet more footage of his blatant dodderiness.
Physical handicaps need not detract from great leadership, of course. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in charge when Allied forces stormed those French beaches 80 years ago, had been afflicted by polio and used a wheelchair and today nobody would question his ability to lead.
But Biden’s health struggles appear to be mental, too. He can’t appear in public without looking lost. His childhood stutter, which he managed to overcome as a younger man, seems to have come back with a vengeance in his twilight years. The First Lady now seems effectively to be doubling up as the First Carer, frequently shepherding her confused husband through his public appearances.
Joe Biden reacts to comedian and actor Roy Wood, Jr. during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington in June 2024
Even Biden’s allies have given up trying to hide their concerns. Last week, in a significant breach of the omerta in Democratic circles on the issue of Biden’s health, senior sources close to the President revealed that, yes, Biden shows his age in meetings. This confirms what Republicans who have dealt with him in recent months allege. In January, at a congressional meeting on national security and Ukraine, it’s claimed that Biden spoke so faintly that people struggled to hear him, paused absently mid-sentence, and closed his eyes for so long aides worried he’d nodded off.
Surveys suggest that only four in ten Americans are confident Biden can even remember his own age, while only one in three believe he can fully digest national security briefings. This widespread perception of Biden’s feebleness is understood to be one of the main reasons why, according to electoral polls, Donald Trump will beat him in November.
It’s not just Biden’s public appearances that cause voters to think he’s not up to the job. As his mind wanders, it’s clear that his administration is increasingly being led by his cabinet and senior members of his team.
It was often said that his first Chief-of-Staff, Ron Klain, was the real powerbroker in the White House — and many believe his replacement, Jeff Zients, now discreetly fulfils the same role. It’s also rumoured that, as conflicts rage from Gaza to Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are the ones calling the shots.
Joe Biden is helped up after falling during the graduation ceremony at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado on June 1, 2023
It’s becoming almost impossible for Team Biden to deny the reality. In February, special counsel Robert Hur announced that Biden could not be held accountable for mishandling classified files — an offence for which Donald Trump has been indicted — because the current president was ‘an elderly man with poor memory’.
Democrats responded by calling Hur a Republican plant: Vice President Kamala Harris said his report was ‘clearly politically motivated’. But the fact remains that, because of his age, Biden was not prosecuted for committing the same crime as Donald Trump, the 78-year-old spring chicken in this year’s gerontocratic election.
It’s a problem that has been brewing for a long time.
Back in 1988, Biden suffered two brain aneurysms. His surgeon later said that he showed no signs of cognitive decline as a result.
Yet some say that Biden’s traumatic personal life has impacted his health. The President’s first wife Neilia Hunter and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in 1972. His son Beau died of a glioblastoma brain tumour in 2015.
And just yesterday, it was announced that his surviving son, Hunter, is facing 25 years in jail — and another tax-crimes trial — after being convicted of lying about illegal drug use when he purchased a handgun in 2018.
Biden has always made excruciating statements in public — as a fit young Senator he was known as ‘the gaffe machine’ — but his many friends in Washington tended to dismiss his missteps and verbal flubs. However, the rumours about his mental decline — and a conspiracy of silence to cover it up — have grown louder as the years have passed.
During his successful bid to win the White House in 2020, his staff would blast out loud music as he mingled with the crowd, seemingly to drown out any worrying conversations their candidate might be having. The Covid pandemic greatly helped Biden’s candidacy, too, as lockdowns enabled him to conduct much of the campaign from his Delaware basement.
Biden listens to the speakers during the World Leaders’ Summit in Glasgow, Scotland in November, 2021
Mean-spirited commentators enjoy suggesting that Biden is ‘juiced up’ for special occasions —ie, meaning that his medical team supply him with a cocktail of drugs. That explains why he so often sounds angry on stage, it is said. On Monday, for instance, the Republican attack machine started spreading images of him on social media drinking a peculiarly coloured liquid from a plastic bottle — much like a doped-up tennis player in between games.
‘This mysterious orange drink is the only thing keeping Crooked Joe Biden from falling into a deep slumber,’ tweeted the Republican National Committee.
But if Biden has been drugging himself this week, it doesn’t seem to have helped. That same evening, he slurred his speech incoherently from the teleprompter. ‘Since the founding of our ideals we don’t know fully what American soil is,’ he said, gnomically.
The truth is that, like most people in their 80s, Biden has good days and bad days. The worry for Democrats is that, as the campaign hots up this summer, he will suffer more of the latter.
Some insiders still whisper that, come the Democratic National Committee in Chicago in August, Biden will be so weak that the party will jettison him in favour of a younger, sharper alternative. One problem with that theory is that the natural replacement would be Kamala Harris, who has performed terribly as ‘veep’ and consistently polls even worse than him.
Biden rubs his eyes during the World Leaders’ Summit at COP26 in Glasgow
It’s also unclear how Biden could be pressured to stand down — given that, for all his slips, he shows no inclination to do so. Insiders say that Jill Biden would be the only person who could persuade the President that enough is enough, but for now she too seems to be adamant that the show must go on.
You don’t succeed on the frontline of American politics for five decades without a certain stubbornness — and Biden is well-known for his ‘grit’. In the Obama years, he often bristled at not being treated with enough respect. ‘My manhood is not negotiable,’ he reportedly said in 2008 when discussing how much power he ought to have in office.
That macho pride is still intact, and may be the one characteristic he clings to most as his faculties melt away.
Many Americans say they are terrified about what ‘The Donald’ might do in a second term. But when the alternative is four more years of an increasingly loopy Joe Biden, it’s little wonder that Trump appears to be on course — barring some divine intervention — to win again in 2024.
Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator.