Who’s Really to Blame for the Disastrous Biden Situation?

In the increasingly pitched coverage of President Joe Biden and the question of whether he has mentally declined to the point of needing to be replaced on the 2024 presidential ticket, conspiracies and collusions seem to be around every corner.

One theory goes that the Biden team and perhaps even the broader Democratic party have long known that the president is in no condition to run, and took great pains to conceal that fact. Another is that Biden’s family are at fault, and that a scheming wife is Lady MacBeth-ing his refusal to drop out. Another is that Biden’s difficulties are largely an invention of a cynical media who are determined to take down a good president because Donald Trump is better for clicks and ratings. And yet another is that reporters knew or should have known about Biden’s decline this whole time and have been refusing to report it out of liberal bias or perhaps professional incompetence.

Something far more mundane might actually be the case: Most people—staff, family, the media—were doing what they thought was correct and professionally responsible at the time. But after Biden’s debate performance raised legitimate questions about his capabilities, and after the thing that felt impossible—replacing him on the ticket—broke into the mainstream, the rationale for protecting the president weakened, ideas of responsibility changed, and normal human emotions (frustration, fear, betrayal) crept in.

It’s probably not entirely clear to anyone—including his closest advisors and even family—just how mentally sharp Biden remains. The man is 81, and if he wins reelection and lives through a second term, will be 86 when he leaves office. As anyone who has been close to an elder as they walk the precipice between “old but doing fine” and “old and no longer fine” can tell you, it’s generally impossible to identify the exact moment when an elderly person slips from one side to the other—and often, the realization that decline is severe enough for intervention to be merited comes too late. The closer we are to people, and the more often we see them, the less we notice the shifts that may seem jarring to those who haven’t been in their company for several months.

This almost surely better explains the Biden family encouraging their patriarch to stay in the race than the (blatantly misogynistic) theory that Jill Biden—who has never displayed any political aspirations, is hardly a fixture of the Washington social scene, and seems much more content teaching her students and being with her family at home in Delaware—is some sort of Lady MacBeth clinging to power by manipulating her weakened husband.

The Biden team and professional inner circle have fewer excuses, and more reason to paper over the president’s struggles. After all, if Biden goes, they mostly do, too. But recall the weeks and months before the debate. Voter concern about Biden’s age had been extensively covered (and often met with accusations that the media was inventing a problem and manipulating the electorate). Biden was running neck-and-neck with Trump. The idea that Biden might step down so another Democrat could step up had been proposed by Ezra Klein back in February, mostly to scorn and backlash, and did not broadly catch on. No Democratic challenger emerged, and no successor was obvious. There wasn’t any robust national conversation about replacing Biden on the ticket. And by all accounts, while the president has slowed, no one with insider knowledge has alleged on or off the record that he is unable to do the job.

So, imagine if you’re working for Biden, and you believe—as I do—that Donald Trump poses a unique and acute threat to democracy and the American project itself, and it’s two weeks ago when virtually no one seriously believed there was appetite for a different Democratic candidate: do you call up a reporter about a slowed-down but still-functional president and contribute to a narrative that won’t change the fact that Biden is the candidate but could substantially weaken his campaign and hand victory to a man you believe to be extraordinarily dangerous?

That debate performance, though, was a shock to the national system. It wasn’t just bad; it felt like a veil-lifting moment when the gauzy image of the president we believed to be true—old, sure, but mostly ticking along just fine—was revealed as a dangerous illusion. This was a turning point for the electorate, but also for the political press and for political pundits. The Biden administration has radically limited journalists’ access to the president, an ongoing source of frustration. And so journalists have—as they do in any administration—relied on insider sources for information. The dissonance between what Biden administration insiders have long been saying and what all of America saw live on CNN wasn’t just jarring, it was appalling and enraging. For many people, whether they be voters or pundits or reporters, the feeling was one of betrayal. It’s not that journalists didn’t report the facts; it’s that many journalists and commentators may now conclude they were manipulated and lied to. And voters may feel the same way.

Partisans on both sides of the aisle, whether they’re MAGA or “ridin’ for Biden,” are quick to blame the media. The right-wing theory is that biased liberal journalists helped to cover up Biden’s decline, which they say was in full force in 2020. The pro-Biden theory is that mainstream outlets both want Trump to win because his politics-as-entertainment shenanigans are better for their bottom line, but also refuse to cover Trump because they’re too busy undercutting Biden’s campaign. And they’re not wrong that the political press has made some grave errors that did, especially in 2016, put a thumb on the scale for Trump (the “But her emails” campaign and the breathless Comey Report coverage just before election day have rightly gone down as some of the biggest journalistic mistakes in the past several decades).

But it’s also true that liberals have gotten much better at pushing back on slanted coverage. Biden’s age has been the topic of much reporting—and every time it’s reported on, there is an onslaught of outrage from Biden supporters who claim it’s an invention of a biased media or even simple ableism (a confusing accusation given the near-consensus that it’s not only acceptable but necessary to discriminate based on a person’s thinking, speaking, and campaigning abilities when we’re talking about people who want to be president). Many well-meaning political journalists, I suspect, do not want a “but her emails” do-over, and have likely considered, in that context, how hard to push the Biden age issue. Trump’s age, his penchant for lying, and questions about his temperament and cognitive abilities were a big part of the coverage of his first campaign, and are dutifully folded into stories about Biden’s age-related shortcomings.

But Trump has a huge advantage in that he has been a ranting nutter of a candidate for nearly a decade now. Voters are well-informed about his clear mental instability, his lies, and his shockingly bad acts. But his party and many of its voters simply don’t seem to care. The news business is one of, well, news. That isn’t an excuse for outlets not covering Trump’s various wrongdoings or dangerous plans or continuous lies, and news outlets should be doing more of this very coverage even if doing so feels repetitive, and make the stakes of this election crystal-clear. But Trump remains extensively covered, including, crucially, his chilling plans for a second term. That his one-millionth fabrication doesn’t move the electoral needle isn’t the fault of any newspaper or network; it’s the result of a Republican Party that has devolved into something resembling a reality-denying cult.

The Democratic Party, for all of its flaws, is thankfully very different. But the fact that Democratic voters do not behave like Republican ones and would be far less likely to line up behind, let alone be excited by, a clearly incapable president is precisely why Democrats are in our current mess. Even worst-case-scenario Biden does not pose the dangers of Donald Trump, and many Democrats will turn out and vote for whoever is on the ticket. But getting die-hard Dems to the polls isn’t the stuff election wins are made of.

That voters hold Biden to a different standard than Trump, and that Biden’s apparent decline has dominated the news cycle of the past week or so while Trump’s has not, is less the result of pro-Trump media bias or liberal media bias than real differences between the Democratic and Republican electorates, actual newsworthiness, and simple human fallibility. Biden insiders who may very well have believed they were doing not just what was best for their candidate but for the nation are now facing a public and a press that believes it has been lied to and cunningly misled (and the fact that the Biden team did, in fact, squirrel him away from the press and turn him into a teleprompter-only candidate seems to be part of a very real effort to obscure and mislead, even if it’s not quite a prop-up-a-corpse conspiracy). Voters are rightly asking why we weren’t made fully aware of this earlier. There is a vast sense of betrayal and distrust, made all the more acute by the deep, stomach-twisting fear felt by anyone who reasonably understands the stakes here—stakes emphasized by the Biden campaign’s own rightful insistence that this is a nation-defining election of life-and-death proportions because democracy itself is on the ballot.

When fear is this deeply felt, and when individuals feel this out of control of their own futures, conspiracies take root. There are no heroes here, and much blame to go around. But there’s also not a great pro- (or anti) Trump media scheme at play, and it seems unlikely that there’s a Watergate-style coordinated political coverup happening, either. The unsatisfying and uncinematic explanation is probably not coordinated treachery by a series of bad actors, but rather a series of bad incentives that led to a lot of bad-in-hindsight decisions, which were only made visible by a new reality brought into being because Joe Biden made the bad decision to run again—and got up on a CNN stage and made his deficiencies undeniable.