Joseph R. Biden appears to have advanced dementia.
Among the abundant evidence for his mental disabilities is now the report of special counsel Robert K. Hur, who recommended against charging Biden for mishandling classified documents, in part because Biden can’t remember anything:
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Mr. Biden’s memory … appeared to have significant limitations – both at the time he spoke to [his ghostwriter Mark] Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office. Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 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. He 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. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. 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 (p. 207f.)
The report was released just a week after Biden confused German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for Angela Merkel and French President François Mitterand for Emanuel Macron; compounding his error, Biden at first said Mitterand, who died in 1996, was “from Germany.” One has the impression of a man who thinks he is still living in the 1990s. In a more recent speech, delivered to defend himself against the characterisations in Hur’s report, Biden called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi “the president of Mexico.” He also railed against the suggestion that he couldn’t remember the date of his son’s death, asking like an angry old man, “How in the hell dare he raise that?” The remarks are ironic, given that Hur included his discussion of Biden’s cognitive defects for exculpatory purposes.
Two mutually supporting theories address this remarkable state of affairs.
The first posits that American political elites, in their eagerness to hoard power and their suspicion of successors, have devolved into a gerontocracy, not unlike that which characterised the Soviet Union in the later stages of its history. The second suggests that the broader managerial system, extending from the civil service to the political establishment and the press, developed a new awareness of their power during their extended campaign to subvert the presidency of Donald Trump, such that they now prefer a passive, weakened president who will be less likely to rein them in or infringe upon their prerogatives. The first theory explains how Biden’s presidency was possible in the first place; the second, how the executive has continued to function despite the incapacity of its leader, why Biden still has many defenders, and why nobody has tried to remove him from power according to the procedures outlined in the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
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Perhaps it’s even true that the American managerial system would prefer that Trump return to office, rather than inaugurate a vigorous and assertive establishment candidate from their own ranks. There is, after all, some measure of autonomy and status also in outright opposition, and Trump’s first presidency was deeply formative for them.
It’s an old plague chronicle theme, but it bears repeating because it is just so significant: The nature of government has changed in subtle but dramatic ways since the great populist backlashes of 2016. Last year, a Twitter friend posted an intriguing thread about the implications of government-by-nebulous-committee that Biden’s incapacity entails. The various people responsible for shaping “Biden’s” policies face substantial problems of coordination which prevent them from taking original or controversial decisions. They propose courses of action that they imagine everybody else with any say will agree with. Mistakes become almost impossible to reverse in this environment; cronyism and patronage are the order of the day. The result is a directionless if ideologically relentless governmental style. The profound incompetence of German politicians has achieved much the same thing.
