22-05-2025
Yes, there was a conspiracy to hide Joe Biden's decline
For the last 25 years, American politics has been roiled by conspiracy theories. Whether it was the claim that 9/11 was an inside job, that Republicans stole the 2004 election, that Democrats ran a Satan-worshipping child abuse racket out of a DC pizza joint or stole the 2020 election, they had a reassuring tendency to be wrong.
After listening to the Hur tapes released on Friday, the claim that a vast left-wing conspiracy kept Joe Biden in power during his first term and tried to keep him in power for a second term when he could not do the job is true. Democrats including members of the Cabinet, leaders in Congress, political consultants and White House staffers from lowly personal aides all the way to the chief of staff hid the fact that the president wasn't functional at all times – maybe for years.
Biden's memory lapses
The October 2023 interviews of Joe Biden by Robert Hur as part of the Justice Department investigation of the president's Delaware garage larded with top secret documents reveal a credible president for about the first hour. After that the memory lapses of basic facts, long silences, sentences that just trail off into nothing and typical elderly reminiscences of events long past, reveal a man who shouldn't have been trusted with the nuclear codes.
As a New York Times reporter put it, 'Again and again, Mr. Biden answers the prosecutor not as someone under federal investigation but as an aging politician recounting his life story for posterity.'
When Hur described Biden as more well-meaning old man than sharp political operator, Hur was telling the unvarnished truth. That doesn't just matter for journalistic fact-mavens who like the truth to be out there as a matter of principle. It matters for Americans who want a president capable of performing all his duties big and small.
For very practical reasons, the presidency is a 24/7 job. You never know when a terror attack is going to hit just after you've had a full day of stressful meetings. You never know when Russia is going to invade a neighbor in the middle of the night. Hurricanes, earthquakes and the deaths of Supreme Court justices don't tend to happen at convenient times.
The extent of the 'cover-up' is revealed in several new books that outline the knowledge and involvement of dozens of high government officials who strategized on how to minimize Biden's exposure to the public, who managed his schedule to cater to Biden's fragile mental state and who went before the cameras to claim that Biden was sharp as a tack.
Since we now undeniably know that a fully-functioning president was not always available for unknown periods over the last four years, the people responsible for covering it up and then attempting to foist an inadequate president on us need to be held accountable. Many of us quite reasonably wonder who was in charge when Biden was not available.
Operation Memory Care
In the years of conspiracy theories that preceded Operation Memory Care across government, social media and academia, there grew a large apparatus aimed at getting Americans to stick to the facts and drop all the conspiracy talk. Perhaps it would be more helpful to the cause if the people at the peak of political power and responsibility did not engage in conspiracies.
This weekend, Biden was revealed to have aggressive prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. We can all feel empathy for anyone suffering such a grim diagnosis, but the need for accountability is not about Joe Biden.
Former vice president Kamala Harris appears to be planning a run for California governor. Former cabinet member Pete Buttigieg is thought to be preparing a run for president. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries could be speaker of the House in a little under two years. White House staffers are fanning out into government, academia, the news media and business where many will hold positions of trust.
What they did — hide the fact that the man who was president was not up to the job for months or years — when they had a constitutional duty to do something about it, is every bit as awful as the conspiracy that led to Donald Trump's attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.
Both events featured blizzards of lies and behind the scenes conspiracies. One tried to put a man who shouldn't have been president in office while the other tried to keep a man in office who could no longer do the job.
Both conspiracies put partisan political interests over the American people's interest in having a real president. We deserve better.
