J.D. Tuccille: Cover-up of Biden's decline made Trump necessary
In the hot mess that is U.S. politics, it's sometimes difficult to decide which is the less-awful choice in a system dominated by two remarkably repulsive political parties. Should you pick the nativist, economically illiterate authoritarians or the antisemitic, economically illiterate totalitarians? New evidence about the deteriorated mental condition of former president Joe Biden — a situation covered-up by top Democrats and dismissed by the brand-name press — suggest that, as bad as President Donald Trump is, his election was a necessary break from an unsustainable situation.
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Transcripts of interviews conducted with Biden by special counsel Robert Hur in October 2023 during an investigation into the handling of classified documents revealed a national chief executive whose mental faculties were failing and unreliable. 'He did not remember when he was vice-president,' Hur wrote in his report, and 'he did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.' As a result, Hur declined to prosecute Biden for mishandling secret material, concluding that in Biden a jury would see 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'
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But the release last week of audio recordings of that interview finally ended any pretense that Joe Biden was still up to the demands of the presidency in 2023 — and for an unknown time before. They're painful to listen to, with the then-president meandering and weak in his speech, fumbling chronology and requiring repeated prompting from his interviewer. (Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis adds another serious concern, though it's not obvious that it worsened his performance in office.)
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As Axios's Marc Caputo and Alex Thompson, who obtained the recordings, noted, 'The newly released recordings of Biden having trouble recalling such details — while occasionally slurring words and muttering — shed light on why his White House refused to release the recordings last year, as questions mounted about his mental acuity.'
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Thompson is also the co-author, with CNN's Jake Tapper, of ' Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,' a book belatedly pulling back the curtain on the debilitated state of the former president. Thompson and Tapper reveal that powerful people knew the former president was incapable of exercising the responsibilities of his office and pretended otherwise. This was obvious to anybody who saw Biden repeatedly stumble over his words on television even before he embarrassed himself in the June 2024 debate with Donald Trump. That event finally prompted him — or those around him — to withdraw from the race and essentially appoint then-vicepresident Kamala Harris as the heir to the Democratic presidential candidacy.
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