Extent of Biden cover-up will haunt democrats

Members of Biden’s cabinet such as Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, both of whom see themselves candidates for the presidency next time, will have to answer for what they knew.

There was once a time when we were content with only a rosily hazy picture of our leaders’ health. Decorum, deference and a little squeamishness protected the general public from being told much more. Winston Churchill had multiple strokes in his last term as prime minister. John F Kennedy was plagued with debilitating back pain and thyroid disease. Franklin D Roosevelt spent much of his presidency in a wheelchair as his disabling polio advanced. But, for all the voters were told, they were hale and hearty, vigorously exercising their responsibilities.

No longer. Now, in addition to reports on the US president’s schedule of meetings with foreign leaders and deputations of girl scouts, we are close to the point where we will be demanding daily updates on the size of his prostate, the number of his bowel movements and the quantity and colour of his sputum.

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

John F. Kennedy.

This is just another intensely vivid consequence of the collapse of trust in the leadership of our wilting democratic societies. A long time ago, we were sufficiently trusting – or naive – to think political leaders were doing what they said they were doing, feeling how they told us they were feeling, and generally up to the task of meeting the most minimal of job requirements: being likely to stay alive for a few more years.

Anyone who thinks that now would be a candidate for institutionalisation themselves. We have been fooled too many times by mendacious protestations from leaders and the media that supposedly cover them to have lost almost all faith. Like Doubting Thomas, we need to be able to put our fingers into the wounds of our presidents before we will actually believe they are living and breathing.

That battered trust took another blow this week with the announcement of Joe Biden’s diagnosis of aggressive stage four prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones. It was an announcement that managed to be both grotesquely transparent and shockingly deceitful. Transparent because most of us instinctively wince at having to hear such personal news about a fellow human. But deceitful because the news places in harsh new light the efforts by the former president and his aides, not merely to disguise his unfitness for the office in the past few years but to gull American voters into thinking he could possibly have served another four years.

The public discussion since the news of the diagnosis has been as unseemly as you would expect: throat-clearing declarations of sympathy for Biden and his family before lengthy and authoritative opinions from oncologists and urologists on the improbability that this discovery of advanced cancer in a man with access to the best medical care in the world could really have only just have been made; rampant speculation from pundits about when it might really have been discovered and how it could have been kept under wraps.

Some of the speculation about the timing suggested it was an effort to evince sympathy for Biden in the very week that a new account was published of his rapidly deteriorating mental and physical health while he was president. Original Sin, a book with the subtitle President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, is an exercise in journalistic chutzpah that does almost as much damage to the reputation of the news media as it does to that of Biden and the Democratic Party.

Biden’s delusion might be forgivable, given his frailty. But, Jill the First Lady and Hunter the wayward son, who fiercely shut down any challenge, bear responsibility Picture: AFP

Its two authors are journalists. One of them, Alex Thompson of Axios, did, to be fair, write from time to time while Biden was president about his cognitive impairments. But the other, Jake Tapper, a prominent CNN presenter, was part of the large pro-Democratic media crowd that happily echoed the fictions of White House staff deriding and dismissing suggestions by Biden’s critics that he was past it. It takes an impressive suspension of personal self-awareness to tell people for years that they mustn’t believe what they can see with their own eyes, and then make a quick million bucks or two by telling them that actually they were right all along.

The revelations in the book provide graphic amplification of the evidence of Biden’s unfitness: how his physical deterioration was so grave that aides discussed the need to put him in a wheelchair if he was re-elected; his growing inability to recognise or correctly identify old friends such as George Clooney, or members of his cabinet like the national security adviser Jake Sullivan; and many more examples. But it is the cynicism on display that is most corrosive of public trust. One Biden aide told the authors: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years – he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”

This from a party that insisted it was the last bulwark defending the American republic against a tyrant who would ride roughshod over the people’s will. Even as they denounced Donald Trump for crimes against democracy they were scheming to re-elect a man most of them knew would be no more than a crepuscular figurehead, behind whom they could direct the nation’s policies, unaccountable to the public.

Perhaps Biden himself can be forgiven for thinking, in his mental frailty, that he could somehow do another four years. But his family, Jill the First Lady and Hunter the wayward son, who both vehemently blocked efforts to question the decision, bear responsibility.

Members of Biden’s cabinet such as Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, both of whom see themselves as candidates for the presidency next time, will have to answer for what they knew; almost the whole Democratic Party leadership too. Trust betrayed is rarely earned back.

The Times