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For at least one member of the hate-Trump, slavishly pro-Biden media, this week’s remarkable reports about President Joe Biden’s mental incapacity in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times were too much.
Former CNN political writer Chris Cillizza, one of the many who covered for Biden from Day 1 of his disastrous presidency, admitted that he should have been tougher on Biden.
Cillizza’s mea culpa invites the obvious question of whether his colleagues will fess up or pretend the exposés never appeared.
The Report
The devastating portrait of Biden portrayed him as out of touch, a barely-there president whose aides formed a protective phalanx to expose as little as possible even to Cabinet officials.
“To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members — including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen — were infrequent or grew less frequent,” the Journal revealed:
Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
Biden was so frail that he even canceled important meetings, as happened in the spring of 2021. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” an official told an aide.
Happily, terrorists didn’t attack the United States when Biden was having a “bad day.”
Two days before the Journal piece appeared, the Times published a similar report about Biden’s failing mental and physical condition and how they affected his behavior during foreign trips. The newspaper called him “weary,” and reported that “it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.”
Though the Journal and Times reports depict a president out of it for years, confirmation that he simply wasn’t up to the job surfaced in July during his calamitous debate with Trump. Aides told Axios that Biden shuts down at about 4 p.m. Biden told Democratic governors that he isn’t too good after 8 p.m.
As well, two top national security officials admitted to an undercover reporter that Biden simply isn’t up to the job. Biden has “degraded mental faculties,” one said, while another confessed that Biden “can’t say a sentence” and he, the aide, “can’t believe it wasn’t a bigger scandal earlier.”
My Bad…
Thus comes Cillizza with his apology for permitting White House aides to get away with the deception, which ended, again, during his debate with Trump, a set-up that enabled Democrats to push him out of his second-term campaign.
“As a reporter I have a confession to make,” Cillizza began:
I should have pushed harder, earlier, for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline. So let me explain.
Joe Biden was president from 2020 to 2024. I worked at CNN through 2022. During that time, the early part when I was at CNN, 2020 to 2022 … Republicans would regularly ping me and say, “Why don’t you ask more questions to Joe Biden and how he’s doing? He’s a 76-, 77-, 78-year-old man?” And I would sort of brush them off.… What I would say is, “Well, there’s no obvious evidence that he’s declining.”
That, of course, is nonsense. The evidence was plentiful that Biden’s was one fall away from a break and a one-way trip to an assisted care facility, if not hospice care.
Cillizza said he didn’t ask more questions because Biden’s palace guard was “absolutely adamant” that even asking a question about Biden’s mental acuity or physical stamina was “age-shaming.”
So “I didn’t really push on it, if I’m being honest,” Cillizza confessed.
Not until he left CNN did it become “a little bit more clear to me about Biden’s age,” and Biden’s performance in the debate made his condition undeniable.
“There have been two stories, one by The New York Times and one by The Wall Street Journal, that document the decline of Joe Biden and how we probably should have known then and reported then what we know now,” Cillizza continued. He then read from both stories.
He admitted again that he should have “pushed harder” against aides who were obviously lying about Biden’s condition.
Biden “bad days” are “a little bit concerning, and [it] begs the question of like, when did people near him know?” Cillizza said:
What did they know, and why did they not share? I get protecting Biden’s privacy. But he’s the president in the United States, right? Like, this isn’t just your grandpa who you want to take the keys from to his car but you’re not totally sure how to approach it.
This is the sitting president … who will continue to be after [the debate] … president for another six months. And we don’t know how far back signs of this physical and mental decline went.
That, again, is false. “We” did know.
Biden’s aides kept him “bunkered” and shamed journalists into not asking about Biden’s condition, Cillizza said, and journalists including himself “should have been pushier.”
I’ll Be Watching Trump
Thus will Cillizza now keep a close eye on Trump, he said, because he is 78:
Even if [Biden] had good days and bad days, well, he had bad days, and those bad days were pretty bad. And when you’re the president of the United States, you don’t get to have good days and bad days. You got to have consistently good — in terms of your mental cognitive abilities, your physical abilities — you got to have good days. And so I think it’s a lesson that we have to learn going forward because, again, Donald Trump will be the oldest person ever to hold office if he serves for four years.
And I will be mindful of that because, again, asking those questions isn’t a partisan thing. Asking those questions is a journalism thing, and I should have pushed harder and not been as willing to accept the “Nah, he’s fine.”
The problem with Cillizza’s admission? In 2021, under this headline, “Republicans keep trying to make Biden’s mental capacity an issue,” he wrote the following:
The Point: This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life. If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.
They tried to bring it forward, as Cillizza admitted in his apology. He ignored them.
H/T: RealClearPolitics
