Yes, Biden’s descent is a cover-up. But who will take the blame?

Artwork: Sean Callinan

Next week the Republican Party will officially nominate Donald Trump as its candidate for president at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. For a masterclass in humility, don’t miss Trump’s acceptance speech.

Kidding. The Trump campaign is triumphalist. Why wouldn’t it be? Of all the sordid White House cover-ups in history, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polio to Bill Clinton’s cigar to Trump’s porn star pay-offs, the conspiracy to conceal President Joe Biden’s mental decay is the most baffling. Perhaps the least sinister. But the most flagrantly, teeth-grindingly pointless.

If you’re going to mislead the American people, at least do it for a grander goal, like enriching billionaires or napalming poor foreign people or stacking top-secret documents on your toilet. But to gamble the country’s future on a harebrained scheme to make the most visible person in the world invisible, so that … what? So that you don’t get primaried by Gavin Newsom? Come on. Aim your corruption higher. Have some self-respect.

I was speaking on Thursday with a senior progressive activist in Washington DC – someone with decades-long relationships with senators and presidents – who also happens to be a lifelong medical doctor. She speculated that Biden has Parkinson’s. I dismissed this as an impossible diagnosis from afar.

Donald Trump.

Billy Connolly.

Technically, yes, it is impossible. Yet Billy Connolly, one of the world’s greatest comics, was non-technically not-diagnosed with Parkinson’s by a Tasmanian surgeon, who noticed his gait from across a Los Angeles hotel lobby. Red flags are red flags, and President Biden is swaddled in them.

Now we learn the President’s doctor met with a Parkinson’s expert at the White House back in January. Yes, January. Be still, my grinding teeth. January was before the primaries locked 3904 delegates into voting for a man whom neither they, nor his potential Democratic rivals, nor the Democratic primary voters, nor the American people, knew may have a decaying brain. His aides, who see him on his bad days, presumably did know. At least, they knew enough to call in a renowned neurologist.

The White House says Joe just had a bad debate. Many sitting presidents do. Barack Obama was trounced by Mitt Romney in 2012. George W Bush performed so poorly against John Kerry in 2004 that some speculated he had presenile dementia. But there’s a difference between losing a debate because you’ve been distracted running the free world, and losing a debate because you can’t follow the train of your own thought for more than 10 seconds.

If an Australian prime minister showed the deficits Biden is displaying, they’d be rolled by lunchtime. Tony Abbott was ousted for eating a raw onion. If he’d rambled on about young women being impregnated by their sisters, his party colleagues would’ve fired him into space.

But that is here. And this is there.

Barack Obama debates Mitt Romney at the third presidential debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, 2012.

There, they circle the wagons to the point of madness. What’s so infuriating about the White House’s lack of candour over the past 12 months is that it’s unnecessary. Many Americans hate Trump enough that they’d vote for Biden’s head floating in a jar. Why make them? This is a rare election where a generic Democrat would beat Donald Trump (and a generic Republican would beat Joe Biden). The Dems could’ve run a block of cheese on a stick and won. In fact, the British Labour Party just did that with great success.

If you’re going to lie to the American people, go big. The Heritage Foundation, a think tank closely aligned with Trump, has developed Project 2025, a plan for Trump’s second term.

It would consolidate executive power by reclassifying civil servants as political appointees, potentially stacking the public service with party loyalists. It proposes shutting down the Department of Education to reshape US schools. It would end the independence of the Justice Department and the FBI. Trump says he knows nothing about it, naturally. He is shocked, shocked, to find that planning is going on in his establishment.

The point is, when Trump lies, he lies big. What has the Biden administration’s lie achieved, except to impose on Americans an impossible choice?

Tony Abbott samples an onion.

When Trump wins in November and unleashes an onslaught against America’s cultural unity, its international power and its independent institutions, there’ll be plenty of blame to go around. The greatest blame will go to the cowards in the Republican Party who know a Trump presidency is antithetical to liberal democracy but were too opportunistic to denounce him.

Some blame will go to American swing voters too uninterested in politics to grasp the stakes. Some blame will go to far-left social justice elites who have made Democrats seem, to many in Middle America, like censorious, identitarian scolds.

But the most infuriating blame will go to Biden’s inner circle of loved ones and White House staff who persuaded an old man that he could bluff his way through the most consequential election of our lifetimes.

When they lose, it’ll serve them right. The infuriating thing is, they’re taking the rest of us down with them.

Josh Szeps is a broadcaster and the host of Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps.