Ash Ponders for The New York Times
The New York Times has just published a powerful and disturbing piece on President Biden’s mental lapses and cognitive decline.
In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.
Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.
The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule. In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides. . .
(A)t a fund-raiser on Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden blamed fatigue for his debate performance. “I wasn’t very smart,” he said. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, I don’t know how many time zones.” He added: “I didn’t listen to my staff, and I came back and I fell asleep on the stage.” . . .
He is certainly not that way all the time. In the days since the debate debacle, aides and others who encountered him, including foreign officials, described him as being in good shape — alert, coherent and capable, engaged in complicated and important discussions and managing volatile crises. They cited example after example in cases where critical national security issues were on the line. . .
But by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago. The White House regularly releases corrected transcripts of his remarks, in which he frequently mixes up places, people or dates. The administration did so in the days after the debate, when Mr. Biden mixed up the countries of France and Italy when talking about war veterans at an East Hampton fund-raiser.
The piece is valuable and provides yet more evidence to those of us who fear that Biden would lose to Donald Trump in November if he continues as the Democratic candidate for president.
But now I have a question for Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The Times.
Where’s the similarly deeply reported piece on Donald Trump? And not just about his mental lapses and cognitive decline, but his constant displays of ignorance of even the most basic reality. Or his increasingly deranged promises to jail his political opponents – which the Supreme Court has now given him license to do.
Yes, the NYT has highlighted Trump’s recent threat, but in a routine news story that carried little of the weight of the piece on Biden:
Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.
Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.
One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.
“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”
That kind of reporting is good but not good enough. Trump, after all, is now the front runner – and the man most likely to be the next President. For that reason alone, he deserves the most intense scrutiny the Times and other media organizations can muster. And bringing greater attention to Trump’s derangement (which poses an even greater threat to the country and the world if he is in office than Biden’s mental lapses) is not, as Marty Baron famously put it when he was editor of the Washington Post, going to war. It’s going to work.