Distrust and Accountability

Erick Erickson on May 16, 2025

CNN's Kasie Hunt interviewed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer the other day. She confronted him about allegations of a meeting with former President Joe Biden that should have raised alarms about Biden's fitness for office. "We're moving forward," Schumer replied. He would not answer the question.

Chuck Todd, speaking afterwards on CNN, said, "He is among the people responsible for this. The leaders of the Democratic Party, the staff of the White House -- and I have to say I find everybody now talking to these authors -- get out of here. Now you tell us?" He then referred to the first 100 days of President Donald Trump's administration as "catastrophic governance."

The American people began raising concerns about Biden's fitness for office while Biden campaigned for the presidency in 2020. Polling in 2021 noted that a majority of the American public had concerns about Biden's mental and physical frailty. Former President Barack Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau now claims Biden declined after the 2022 midterms. New reporting from CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson notes Biden regularly had bad days before 2022, but as he aged, he got even worse.

Democrats would have us believe it was stress related to Hunter Biden. But these same Democrats refused to release the audio of Biden's interview with Special Prosecutor Robert Hur. The same reporters who now claim they were stunned and their sources would not be candid with them were the very same reporters who never fought for the release of the Hur audio and, in fact, treated the Hur report's conclusion that Biden was not mentally fit to stand trial as a partisan statement.

Axios's Alex Thompson is one of the few reporters the Biden administration blackballed for regularly covering Biden's decline. CNN's Tapper, for his part, told his colleague John Berman, "I'm not going to speak for anybody else, but knowing then what I know now, I look back at my coverage during the Biden years -- and I did cover some of these issues, but not enough."

Comcast gave Biden White House Press Secretary Jenn Psaki her own show. She used her show to deflect from concerns about Biden's decline. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's Morning Joe told his audience on March 6, 2024, "F you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever." This contradicts both the new Democrat spin that Biden began a rapid decline after 2022 and also the Tapper and Thompson revelations that the decline had started being noticed in 2019.

"Look, what we learned through our reporting is that starting in around 2019, 2020, there were two Bidens. There was a Biden that was perfectly workable, serviceable, seemed fine. And then there was a non-functioning one that couldn't come up with names of top aides, that would lose his train of thought to an alarming degree. And that non-functioning Biden reared his head increasingly over and over," Tapper told Berman.

This gets back to Chuck Todd's comments about Senator Schumer. "Now you tell us," he says. But what did they need to tell us? The American people were raising concerns in 2020 and 2021. It was the American press corps that insisted Americans not believe their lying eyes. It was voices on CNN and MSNBC that had Democrats on to insist the video of Biden being led off stage by Barack Obama had been mischaracterized by Republicans.

"Catastrophic governance" is how Todd characterized this opening of Trump's new term. That, I suspect, gives us the answer to the big question -- how could the press cover for Biden when the American people themselves knew something was wrong? Because, at that time, Biden was the only thing standing between the presidency and Trump. Now that he has lost, the truth can be told, except for the part of the press's complicity in the cover-up. Americans did not need White House sources to tell them something was wrong. Only America's top reporters did, and without those sources, they insisted until the bitter end that the public got duped by the GOP.

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To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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