During the entire campaign leading up to former President Joe Biden’s July 21, 2024, withdrawal from the presidential race, he and his Democrat Party were telling the American people that “democracy is on the ballot.”
While they continued that rhetoric through the end of the campaign once former Vice President Kamala Harris was undemocratically anointed the candidate, they initially wanted to sell the American people on the idea that they should vote for Biden — knowing it would be a vote for a grab-bag of wannabe oligarchs jockeying for power because the man cosplaying as president was mentally incapable of running the country.
In March 2024, California Democrat Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff (now, a senator) had a discussion where Pelosi insisted that “democracy is on the ballot … your rights … in every aspect of our lives, you will be affected. So we have to take responsibility for our democracy, for our country, for ourselves, for our families.”
Schiff, almost as if projecting about the state of the Biden administration, cited “a really powerful column … that was absolutely chilling,” which “talks about what America would look like with an autocratic ruler. How we would no longer have a say in our affairs, how government would become fully corrupted, how we would not be choosing our representatives anymore, how policy decisions would not be made on the public’s behalf but only to preserve the power of the despot.”
“Part of what’s necessary to preserve our democracy is making sure that the economy works for people,” he continued. “And no president, and I would say no speaker, has done more in the last several years than Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi …”
Countless Democrats, including Biden himself, and neocon and never-Trump grifters parroted the lines when they thought Biden was again to be the candidate, and by the same token proclaimed that Trump represented some sort of fascist takeover, where, as Schiff claimed, no one would be able to choose their representatives anymore.
But if anything is clear, Democrats were insisting Americans vote for someone they knew would ensure people would not actually have a say in who was president.
According to Jake Tapper, who was a leading member of the corporate media cover-up of Biden’s mental decline but nonetheless wrote a book about it while pretending to be a hard-hitting journalist, he sourced over 200 Democrat “insiders,” including staffers, who knew of Biden’s decline for years and chose to do nothing about it.
“Almost all of these interviews were after the election and they justified to themselves what they had done in terms of misrepresenting how the president was, not just to me and Alex and other reporters, but also just to each other and to the world and to Democrats and to the Cabinet, etc. by — by saying that there was this existential threat of Donald Trump and only Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump, and that justified everything in their minds,” Tapper told host Megyn Kelly, who was grilling him on his incompetence as a reporter:
But so, the people at the White House, when I would call, when others would call, when Alex would call, would lie. ‘He’s fine. He’s fine.’ You’d call Democrats and say, ‘What are you seeing behind the scenes here because this is concerning?’ ‘He’s fine. He’s fine . This is just a moment. He’s 79. He’s 80. He has moments like that, but he’s fine. His decision making’s fine.’
One of the things that emerged was that there were two Bidens. One was the fine Biden, serviceable, adequate, and the other one was a — is a non-functioning Biden, and that’s the one we saw the night of the debate, and that’s the one we saw some clips of here and there that you just showed. And that non-functioning Biden, the one that lost his train of thought in — in a significant way, not in the way just that every human loses their train of thought, but in a way that shows that he’s having trouble articulating his very views and the one who forgot the name of close aides, who was not able to come up with George Clooney’s name, didn’t seem to recognize him, all that sort of thing. That non-functioning Biden was, according to our reporting, showed up as — as far back as 2015 …
Most of his campaign staff and others would say like, ‘He’s, you know, he’s 78, he’s 79, he has senior moments, but he’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine.’ Well, he wasn’t fine and in — in — throughout his presidency, that non-functioning Biden would show up more and more and more, and he was worse and worse and worse, really, from deteriorating tremendously.
Tapper described a Biden who appears to have started his decline in 2015 and started a rapid decline by 2023, meaning Biden’s own longtime doctor, Kevin O’Connor, appears to have been in on the lie, too, claiming in 2024 he was a “a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
The American people had been noticing Biden’s mental decline for some time, and particularly took note in 2024 when 76 percent of voters expressed concern over it. At the same time, special counsel Robert Hur, who interviewed Biden, had concluded “Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations” and that he would appear to a jury like a ” a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
They never released the full interview, until now, and Hur’s description, damning as it was, appears to grossly oversell Biden’s mental abilities.
That did not stop top Democrats from coming to Biden’s defense, lauding his mental ability despite the fact that — given the hundreds of insiders who apparently knew from Tapper’s book — they must have known he was incapable of the job.
Harris said Hur’s report, which if anything did more to advance a cover-up, was “clearly politically motivated,” and claimed that Biden was really “on top of it all.”
Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas beclowned himself by saying, “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented, and focused.”
Mitch Landrieu, the national co-chair of the Biden campaign, said, “this guy’s tough, he’s smart, he’s on his game,” adding to what Mayorkas said, “‘When you go on to brief the president, you better have your big boy pants on. And this kind of sense that he’s not ready for this job is just a bucket of BS that’s so deep, your boots will get stuck in it.”
Biden’s personal counsel Bob Bauer insisted that Biden “does not” have any mental issues.
Even after Biden dropped out of the race, with several months to go in his presidency, the White House was trying to peddle the lie that he was “as sharp as ever,” to quote former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre from July 2024.
As my colleague Brianna Lyman pointed out, the only thing that needs to be done is for Republicans to find out who was really running the country for four years.
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
