Most of us can judge Biden’s mental fitness only by his many struggles in public appearances — most recently forgetting the name “Hamas” while trying for about 30 painful seconds to articulate the state of hostage negotiations, referring to his recent meeting with a French president who died in 1996, and claiming to have discussed the Capitol riot with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died nearly four years before it took place.
We are left to wonder: If the president is this diminished in public, what is he like behind closed doors?
Well, the special counsel office’s report draws back the curtain and shows us. Based on its review of dozens of hours of recorded conversations between Biden, his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, and “on our direct interactions with and observations of him” during interviews with Justice Department lawyers, a deeply troubling picture emerges a man who at times seems incapable to conducting basic conversations.
“Mr. Biden’s memory … appeared to have significant limitations,” Hur writes, “both at the time he spoke to Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office.” The recorded conversations with the ghostwriter “are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur continues. Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
The report adds that Biden’s “memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” adding that “among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”
Hur concludes that jurors would likely find “Mr. Biden’s apparent lapses and failures” in sharing classified information with his ghostwriter in 2017 “consistent with the diminished faculties and faulty memory he showed in Zwonitzer’s interview recordings and in our interview of him.”
As a columnist without a medical degree, I am in no position to diagnose Biden, and neither are most Americans. But we see what we see — how his gait has stiffened and his ability to answer simple questions has declined. Which is why multiple polls show that 76 percent of American voters believe Biden is too old to effectively serve another term as president and 54 percent say he no longer has “the competence to carry out the job of president.”
That was based on his public appearances. But the special counsel’s description of his private interactions raises these concerns to Defcon 1. If the president is this confused in his meetings with Justice Department lawyers, how bad are his interactions with world leaders or his meetings with his own national security officials in the Situation Room? During the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Biden falsely claimed that none of his military advisers had recommended leaving a residual force of 2,500 troops, only to have those military leaders testify that they had in fact given him that advice. Did he lie, or did he simply not recall what they had told him? Which is worse?
A few weeks ago, much of Washington was outraged by a defense secretary who failed to disclose a serious medical condition and undermined the military chain of command. Well, now we have reason to be concerned about the man at the top of that chain of command.
Biden’s news conference Thursday, in which he angrily defended his mental acuity (“I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing”) only made things worse. He referred to President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt as the “president of Mexico” and claimed the special counsel never said that he shared classified information when Hur’s report said he “disclosed classified materials.”
In trying to rebut the report’s assertions, Biden pointed out that his five hours of interviews with the Justice Department across two days came as he was “managing an international crisis.” The first of the interviews came one day after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel — and the special counsel’s report said Biden displayed “diminished faculties and faulty memory.” Can Americans afford to have a president with diminished faculties managing an international crisis?
The president’s closest aides protect him, and foreign leaders wouldn’t publicly reveal any concerns about their discussions with him, for fear of damaging relations with the United States. But the special counsel has shown us Biden behind the scenes. If the president is “struggling to remember events” during his “painfully slow” interactions with others, how can he effectively conduct diplomacy or make decisions on matters of peace and security?
There are wars raging in Europe and the Middle East; U.S. forces are under attack in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea; the risk of war in the Pacific is growing; and rising numbers of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list are trying to slip into the United States by illegally crossing the southern border. And apparently the commander in chief dealing with these overlapping crises is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
We’re now beyond concern about whether Biden is fit to serve a second term; we should be concerned about whether he is fit to finish his first.
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