US Presidential Election: Shock of the news – truth about Joe Biden is no real surprise

America’s liberal left elites have conspired to prosecute Donald Trump as the personification of evil while concealing the glaring incompetence of the incumbent President.

An attendee wearing a US President Joe Biden mask holds a sign calling for him to be fired at the Republican National Convention.

In the space of just over two weeks the twin false narratives of American political debate were shattered, dramatically transforming this year’s presidential race. While Joe Biden and the Democrats are culpable for their part in these deceptions, mainstream media in the US and elsewhere, including in Australia, must be called out for their complicity.

The pretence that Biden is cogent and capable of running and serving a second term was blown apart as he crumbled, live to air, in the first presidential debate late last month. And just over a fortnight later a would-be assassin’s bullet shattered the myth that it is Donald Trump and his supporters who, alone, have injected hatred and division into this toxic but routinely partisan contest.

America’s liberal left elites – politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, academics and activists – have conspired to prosecute Trump as the personification of evil while concealing the glaring incompetence of incumbent Biden. The reality has been hiding in plain sight for anyone willing to observe it or trust media sources routinely described as “right wing” and therefore assiduously ignored by the liberal left.

In this newspaper just over a week ago, former ABC presenter Josh Szeps inadvertently exposed the depth of this delusion. After the President’s disastrous debate performance, Szeps complained that the White House had hidden the true extent of Biden’s cognitive decline.

“What’s so infuriating about the White House’s lack of candour over the past 12 months is that it’s unnecessary,” Szeps wrote. “Many Americans hate Trump enough that they’d vote for Biden’s head floating in a jar.”

There you have it, as pithy as you could get it. The President’s feeble-mindedness is a surprise, and the central political proposition is antipathy towards Trump. Those have been the twin pillars of the liberal-left false narrative for more than four years. Reality can come at you fast when you have kept it at bay for so long.

Biden’s lack of mental acuity has been obvious since before he was elected, when he and Democrat spinmeisters used the cover of the pandemic to hide him in the basement for most of the campaign. I could not have been the only person calling it the Weekend at Bernie’s campaign or, since Biden’s inauguration, running clips of Chauncey Gardiner for amusing but worrying comparisons. Within months of taking office Biden was getting worse.

In June 2021 at the G7 meeting in Cornwall the President repeatedly confused Libya and Syria. “And for example the rebuilding of, of Syria, of Libya, of, you know, this is, they’re there,” Biden said. At the same conference the President paused for almost 10 seconds, mute and lost in thought, as he struggled to answer a question about Vladimir Putin.

US President Joe Biden and former president Barack Obama attend a campaign fundraiser at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles in June.

In his first year Biden also fell asleep at the Glasgow climate conference, and elsewhere.

This was almost three years ago. We have seen him fall up stairs, fall down on stage, fall off a bike, wander aimlessly at events, freeze on stage, forget the names of his cabinet members and look to recognise in an audience someone who had died. The extent to which these episodes have been ignored, censored and played down by most media is scandalous. It has been blatantly obvious for at least three years that partisan bias has shaped news coverage and sought to deny the truth.

On Sky News in November 2021, I said most of the media in the Western world “dares not mention or scrutinise the uncertain world of Biden’s mental acuity” and I declared it would be impossible for the President to run for a second term. This is an assessment I have repeated with intensifying certainty ever since.

The mechanism for this unfolding was always going to be unpredictable but the fact it would be necessary was obvious years ago.

This is not to claim any special insight but to point out that what was plain to any observer has been assiduously avoided by so many. Driven by hatred of Trump, they have sought to prop up Biden – and look at where it has left them.

It is no good blaming others. Szeps, for instance, hosted ABC radio through this period, why was he not exposing and discussing this? Was he afraid to be seen as Trumpian? Instead, he claims to have been tricked by the White House – please.

Just last month when Biden attended a fundraiser in Hollywood hosted by George Clooney there was another telling incident when the President seemed lost and frozen on stage and Barack Obama had to usher him off stage. Some of us reported this and showed it on air, but again most media ignored it until this month when Clooney called on Biden to pull out of the race and suddenly journalists pulled out the worrying vision that had been pertinent and available all along.

It is instructive to compare this boosterism with the way the same media ridiculed and denounced Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard as fools and/or ogres. If Biden were a conservative he might have been hounded from office before the mid-terms.

The disingenuous effort to avert everyone’s eyes from Biden’s vulnerability fell apart in the debate because with the eyes of the nation on him, live to air, there was no disguising the disturbing reality of his diminished capacity. Clearly this Biden denialism was motivated by the other false narrative strand, the hatred of Trump.

The former Republican president and his supporters are not saints and undoubtedly have been polarising and divisive at times, with the violence of the January 6 Capitol Hill riots the worst example. Yet not only has the media and political narrative exaggerated those events and Trump’s role in them but it also has ignored or downplayed the leftist riots that greeted Trump’s election in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s pleas for people to join the “resistance” and the exhortations to violence against Trump by movie stars, singers, comedians and politicians.

These violent overtones are never acceptable, yet for too long they have been called out on only one side. The scrapping of comedy rock band Tenacious D’s Australian concert tour after guitarist Kyle Gass wished for better aim from Trump’s would-be assassin is a welcome sign the left may, for now at least, be subjected to the standards it demands of others.

Anyone who has been around a while in this country will remember the frightening Parliament House riots of 1996 and know Labor politicians including then opposition leader Kim Beazley were involved in the protests that preceded the assault on parliament. Beazley told the crowd the Howard government “hates workers, it hates students, it hates Aboriginal people, it hates women”. Yet the riot and violence, rightly, were never pinned on those Labor MPs in the way media and Democrats have sought to pin the Capitol riots on Trump. Similar standards for right and left should not be too much to ask.

For the past eight years or more the Democrats and their media allies have framed the Republicans as purveyors of hatred. Even our own ABC has begun yet another multi-part, Four Corners hit job against Trump full of half truths and deceptions.

Astonishingly, it deceptively uses a Trump phrase, “it’s gonna be a bloodbath”, out of context to imply a threat of political violence if he loses the election, even though this has been revealed time and again as a reference to an economic bloodbath in the automotive industry if cheap Chinese imports are allowed into the US via Mexico. This is shoddy and reckless stuff because, just like the Democrat claims that Trump is an existential threat to democracy or a Hitler-like figure, it escalates fears and tensions in a volatile political and social environment.

The horror of the assassination attempt underscores this point – the blame lies with the gunman but the toxic political climate matters. We can only guess who the media and Democrats would be blaming if the bullets had been directed at Biden.

It is worth reminding ourselves that our ABC ran a three-part series in 2018 – modestly billed as the “story of the century” – that expounded the discredited and now disproven leftist conspiracy theory that Trump was installed by Putin. Our public broadcaster has never corrected, withdrawn or apologised for this abomination – the series is still available on its website – yet now it is spending more of our tax dollars on another disingenuous attack on Trump.

This is a misuse of taxpayers’ money. The tendentious reporting cannot impact on US politics, does not inform Australians – in fact, it misinforms them – and so is nothing but an ideological indulgence by ABC staff at our expense.

With a feeble President in hiding, incapable of speaking, debating or leading, and Trump ascendant on a wave of sympathy after weathering almost a decade of hysterical and malicious abuse, you might think the liberal left and its media mates might consider a different strategy. False narratives, by definition, will always be exposed by the facts, so perhaps it would be better to base their campaigns on reality and honest appraisals of the President and his opponent.

Trump is gauche, abrasive, transactional, egotistical and unorthodox, but he is not the first horseman of the apocalypse. It is absurd to portray him as a threat to democracy itself when he has previously been elected to the White House and can return only if he wins the election again.

By feeding animosity and fear, the left has been at least as culpable in creating the polarised and toxic politics in the Great Republic as Trump and his supporters.