What Did the President Not Know, and When Did He Not Know It?
"What did the president know, and when did he know it?" That was the iconic question posed by Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, during televised hearings in 1973, to former White House Counsel John Dean about Nixon's knowledge of and involvement in the break-in at Democratic HQ and the subsequent coverup.
Now we need someone -- presumably a Republican exercising Congress' constitutional oversight duty -- to ask someone in the know -- definitely a Democrat who worked inside the White House -- what former President Joe Biden didn't know and when it became clear that his thoughts were turning foggy.
As most voters are only learning now that it's too late, after the election, there is ample evidence that we were repeatedly misled by top administration officials and their allies in the media about Biden's mental acuity and the physical effects of his advanced age, the highest ever for a president. Now that he's been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, a disease that would have been detected by the standard prostate-specific antigen test administered annually to U.S. presidents, we must ask: Were we lied to about his physical conditions too?
In January 2024, then-Vice President Kamala Harris painted a picture of a leader who was sharp as a tack: "I'll tell you, the reality of it is, and I've spent a lot of time with Biden, be it in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room and other places -- he is extraordinarily smart. He has the ability to see around the corner in terms of what might be the challenges we face as a nation or globally."
Democratic media allies laid it on thick. "I've said it for years now, he's cogent. But I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he's been around for 50 years. ... Start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth. And F you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever." MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said that in March 2024.
"As sharp as ever," former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Biden on July 3, 2024, a week after his catastrophic debate performance. Biden dropped out of the race on July 21. To hear her tell it, the president was an intellectual tornado: "He is someone that engages with us. He wants to know, he pushes us ... wanting to figure out like the bigger picture of whatever we're trying to explain to him, or even granular details."
During this same period, we now know, White House aides did not allow most cabinet members to see the president. Biden appeared "incoherent and frail" during a White House meet-and-greet with influencers before the April 2024 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, struggling to tell understandable stories. Biden couldn't recognize George Clooney at a June 2024 fundraiser, prompting the actor to write an alarmed op-ed.
Clearly, we were lied to. Or the people around Biden were stupid. Or both.
We need to find out exactly what happened. Because the worst possible interpretation is really bad: that a cabal of Democratic National Committee insiders, Biden staffers, family members and journalistic stooges deliberately misrepresented Biden's cognitive state to get him elected, keep him in place for four years while unelected ciphers secretly ran the country, and then plotted to run what was left of him for a second four-year term, during which they planned to maintain their increasingly ridiculous ruse. If even half of these allegations are true, this was a silent coup d'etat. Democracy depends on the people knowing who and what they are voting for; anything less is an alien form of government.
The political powerbrokers who aided and abetted the Biden coup are still in place. Unless they are exposed, they will remain in a position to subvert the people's will. As things stand, something like this can happen again. While it's tempting to "look forward" -- Democrats' current crisis-response talking point -- and instead focus on illegal deportations and other outrages being carried out by President Donald Trump, we must clean house and hold those responsible accountable. Democratic voters should remember that what Jake Tapper calls Biden's "Original Sin" -- his decision to run for reelection -- gave us Trump 2.0. That choice was masterminded by current Democratic Party leaders who gambled democracy against what they called fascism, and lost.
Some people tried to raise the alarm.
Dean Phillips, the former Minnesota congressman who challenged Biden in the 2024 primaries, promised to continue the president's policies but worried about his chances in a general election. Party bosses retaliated by stripping him of his committee chairmanship and declaring him a pariah.
After spending hours deposing him in October 2023, Special Counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden over the classified documents he took home with him after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, concluding that a jury would see him as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Democrats called Hur a cruel partisan hack. Tapes of the depositions confirm Hur's assessment.
I cried into the wind over the years:
March 9, 2020: "Joe Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw. ... Democrats are conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia."
Nov. 7, 2020: "Biden will be the first president to begin his first term with clear signs of dementia."
April 2, 2021: "The president has dementia."
Those who pointed out that the emperor had no brain were ignored, insulted, marginalized and accused of ageism and secretly supporting Trump. Apologies would be nice. But what is more important is to clear the air by exposing the truth so that the next time something like this happens, Americans who raise the alarm get taken seriously.
Why hasn't the GOP Congress opened an investigation into the Biden coup? Maybe they're afraid of setting a precedent that could soon be used against Trump. After all, he's the same age as Biden was in 2020 and has a similar tendency to babble incoherently. Or perhaps they're following Napoleon's advice to never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.
Republicans need to step up. Did Democrats knowingly install a president they knew was senile and/or suffering from an advanced fatal disease?
It's time for Congress to find out.
========
Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.
----
Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Comments