In conservative media, The Biden dementia coverup is the hottest story since Hunter’s laptop. Right-leaning websites, social media, magazines and cable channels are all trying to outdo one another with charges of coverup, Constitutional crisis and bombshell revelations. Here are a few samples:
CNN commentator Scott Jennings claimed “ The biggest scandal in American history is the cover-up of Biden’s condition.”
Republican Congressman Buddy Carter claimed “This is potentially the biggest political scandal of our lifetime.”
Chairman James Comer of the House Committee on Oversight raged: ““The cover-up of President Biden’s obvious mental decline is a historic scandal. The American people deserve to know when this decline began, how far it progressed, and who was making critical decisions on his behalf. Key executive actions … such as sweeping pardons for the Biden Crime Family, must be examined considering President Biden’s diminished capacity.”
Over on the Senate side of Congress, Senator John Cornyn crowed “This is about a constitutional crisis, where we basically had a mentally incompetent president who was not in charge… Whose finger was on the nuclear button?,” Cornyn asked.
Behind the rhetoric, there are two claims being made here: first, that Biden was mentally declining to the point of incompetence, and second, that there was a cover-up of this decline. On one of these two claims, Republicans and the conservative media do not seem to be aware that they are setting a trap for themselves.
Because Donald Trump is accessible and Biden was not, these politicians and pundits think that the two Presidents are totally different. The trap of their own making is that their words will come back to haunt them. We are now watching the legacy media tire of its contrition for the journalistic malpractice exposed in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book Original Sin. It will not be long before the same charges of mental incompetence and dysfunctional dementia are hurled towards Donald Trump. In fact, they have already begun. Here are a couple of examples:
From PBS: “Trump’s rambling speeches raise questions about mental decline”
From The Daily Beast: “Aging, Slurring Trump ‘Lives in Fear’ of Dad’s Dementia.”
“President Trump reportedly avoids talking about the touchy subject, partly because he bashed his predecessor Joe Biden for allegedly being cognitively impaired, but also because he fears this could be his fate too. Donald Trump’s nephew Fred C. Trump said last year that he fears a similar path for the president… He sees it in parallel to Fred Trump, Senior’s decline.”
MindSiteNews offers this post from Dr. John Gartner, a psychotherapist and faculty member at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.: “When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence… He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs. And why is he talking about Hannibal Lector – a fictional character who was not great; he was a murderer, a serial killer… And there is an accelerating rate of decline.”
These allegations of Trump’s decline are from less-than-major online news sources, but that’s where rumor-mongering always starts. The question is, will these observations, diagnoses and charges break into the mainstream legacy media? All it will take is a major flub in a major Trump speech or television appearance, and then you’ll hear Trump’s own words and those of his closest supporters used against them.
The trap is set, and the target is only one big bungle away from walking into it. Pray that he does not, and that the rhetoric on Biden’s dementia cools down
Politics often resembles an armed conflict, and in an armed conflict, it’s best not to arm your enemy.