The front page of Saturday’s New York Times featured a 2,700-word investigative report by Katie Rogers, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Carl Hulse, “How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President.” Better late than never?
The reporters made it quite clear the president’s inner circle was quite aware of his mental decline.
The president’s acknowledgment [“that he may not have made it through a second term"] has put a new spotlight on his family and inner circle, all of whom dismissed concerns from voters and Mr. Biden’s own party that he was too old for the job. And yet they recognized his physical frailty to a greater degree than they have publicly acknowledged. Then they cooperated, according to interviews with more than two dozen aides, allies, lawmakers and donors, to manage his decline.
The Times noted “the concerns over his age were there from the start,” peppered with damning details from throughout Biden’s term in office:
The worst mishap was in June 2023, when Mr. Biden tripped over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy commencement. It took five seconds for Secret Service agents to help the president to his feet, an eternity when seen on television.
(Funny the Times should call it "the worst mishap," given the link to a Times story which underplays the incident: "Mr. Biden, who is 80 years old, was helped up and appeared to recover quickly.")
After noting how special counsel Robert Hur “described [Biden] in a devastating report in as a 'well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,'” the story ended ignominiously with Biden’s “halting, incoherent performance” at the debate with Trump. He would drop out of the race three weeks later.
But the Times told quite a different story on June 21, 2024, less than week before Biden’s disastrous debate performance that would push him out of the race, a notoriously credulous defense of Biden right from the headline: “Biden Battles Age Doubts and a Trail of Misleading Videos,” by Katie Glueck, Tiffany Hsu, and Ang Li.
The story contained eight references to “misleading” clips of Biden and referenced “cheap fakes” three times, a coinage by Biden supporters employed apparently whenever a Republican forwarded a video of Biden that made him look old and out of it.
President Biden has many adversaries in this year’s election. There are his Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, and the independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And then there is the distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.
In the last two weeks, conservative news outlets, the Republican National Committee and the Trump team have circulated videos of Mr. Biden that lacked important context and twisted mundane moments to paint him in an unflattering light….
The paper mounted individual defenses of Biden’s behavior from three different viral clips, including the famous one of Biden wandering off during a Group of 7 meeting (“he was greeting paratroopers,” the Times huffed, which doesn’t change the fact that Biden wandered off).
A New York Times review of these videos found that some scenes were cut short and taken out of context, while other clips were cropped in a way that omitted crucial details when compared with additional footage.
This paragraph aged like milk:
Mr. Biden’s allies hope that next week’s debate will offer Americans a fuller picture of his capabilities -- and a reminder of Mr. Trump’s penchant for falsehoods and outrageous statements. The videos of Mr. Biden that Republicans are pushing may also have the unintended effect of lowering expectations for his debate performance.
The story, embarrassing at the time, is mortifying now, given the undeniable truth of Biden’s infirmity that came out at the debate a few days later, wholly nullifying this attempt at Democratic boosterism.