The President was not well.
And the First Lady and his senior staff “went to extraordinary lengths to conceal the extent of the president’s disability. For over four months (the President) remained in seclusion, and the government all but ran itself.”
No, the President of whom this was written was not Joe Biden. It was Woodrow Wilson, post-World War One. Wilson had suffered a stroke and, surprise surprise, was in bad shape. Said his press secretary in his diary in 1920:
He has been ill since last October, and he cannot know what is going on. He sees almost nobody and hears almost no direct news…Was there ever such a situation in our history!
So records Wilson biographer Christopher Cox (a former California Congressman and Reagan staffer) in his book Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn.
What is notable is the fact that the media of the day was not reporting the actual state of the President’s condition. To the extent anything was reported it was merely that Wilson was suffering from exhaustion and needed rest.
Does any of this media reluctance to report on Democrat Wilson’s actual condition ring a bell?
Turn now to an edition of the Washington Times from this past week and a story by the paper’s longtime reporter Joseph Curl. And no, the story was not about Woodrow Wilson. Curl’s headline:
Media, not Trump, told ‘lie of the year’
The cover-up of Biden's mental decline
Among other things, Curl wrote:
The 'Lie of the Year”'could easily have been awarded to the media. As the damning recent reports about Mr. Biden have emerged, some reporters who covered him acknowledged that they dropped the ball.
Bingo.
But the real story here is worse.
Why - why - did the media drop the ball when it came to accurately reporting on Biden’s condition?
The reason is clear. These “reporters” were not independent journalists. They were - and are - liberal activists. And under the circumstances of Biden’s condition, their self-imposed real job was to hide the reality of Biden’s mental decline.
Here are some headlines after the Trump-Biden debate.
From Business Insider:
Photos show Americans' horrified reactions to the Biden-Trump debate
From Yahoo News:
US commentators shocked by Biden's 'painful' debate performance
From The Economist:
Joe Biden’s horrific debate performance casts his entire candidacy into doubt
The president had one job and he utterly failed at it
From NBC News:
'Babbling' and 'hoarse': Biden's debate performance sends Democrats into a panic
There were more headlines like that out there. Oh so many more.
But - why the shock? The stunned reactions? Why did it take the first three-plus years of the Biden presidency for the media to investigate the real story of Biden’s mental and physical health?
The answer is as obvious as it is simple. The hard fact is that from the time he emerged as the Democrats choice in 2020, the liberal media did its level best to protect Biden from the harsh reality of a probing media.
The Democratic nominee campaigns - from his basement? No big deal.
Questions about who is actually running the Biden White House? Nah. In fact it wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal ran an extensive deep dive into the the operation of the Biden White House - on December 26th of 2024, with less than a month left in his term - that this headline was produced:
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.
The obvious is at hand. The media’s reluctance to focus on Biden’s condition and the real-behind-the-scenes operations of the Biden White House came about because of so-called “journalists” resolved to protect a liberal president from embarrassing, not to mention politically damaging, news stories. In short, there was a media cover-up of the reality of the Biden White House.
Can you imagine if the President’s name were - Donald Trump?
In a matter of days, the Trump second term will be launched on January 20th. And the betting here is that the next four years, unlike the four years of the Biden presidency, will be filled with media stories detailing every last bit of minutia inside the Trump White House. With a virtual industry made of stories questioning the 47th president’s mental and physical health and who’s up and who’s down in the Land of Trump.
Buckle in.
And Happy New Year.