President Biden raised eyebrows at the Group of Seven summit in June 2021, just months into his term, with an embarrassing memory lapse that sparked laughter from fellow world leaders.
Representatives of the world’s seven leading industrial nations had gathered in England. It was Mr. Biden’s first major meeting as president with foreign dignitaries.
Mr. Biden, who was 78, publicly chided British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for not introducing the president of South Africa, even though Mr. Johnson had already introduced him by name.
Mr. Biden appeared confused. He looked around the room bewilderedly before mumbling, “Oh, he did?” His words trailed off, and the other leaders broke into laughter.
Weeks earlier, Mr. Biden forgot the name of his secretary of defense. After a few seconds of struggling, the president called him “the guy who runs that outfit over there.”
Few news outlets in the U.S. covered the president’s mental misfires, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle ignored them.
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Still, those incidents provided the first glimpse of a spark that has erupted into a three-alarm fire engulfing the Democratic Party ahead of the November elections.
Since Mr. Biden’s confused and sometimes incoherent June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump, panicked Democrats have called for Mr. Biden to bow out of the presidential race and to be replaced with a younger candidate.
Yet questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness to serve were apparent years before the debate when he struggled to complete his thoughts and stared vacantly. Though The Washington Times chronicled Mr. Biden’s deterioration and polls recorded voters’ growing doubts about his fitness for office, mainstream media outlets rarely reported the story.
“It makes the media look partisan,” said Richard Benedetto, a former White House correspondent who teaches journalism at American University. “I have no doubt that the White House press corps knew all along that Biden was slipping, but they thought he was a better choice than Donald Trump and looked the other way. We didn’t see any of these stories before the debate.”
David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University, dismissed the idea of a media conspiracy to cover up Mr. Biden’s health concerns.
“Look at all the podcasters and people who have looked at it pretty fairly and knew three years ago that Biden was unpopular and knew three years ago that his health wasn’t going to get better,” he said.
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Throughout Mr. Biden’s presidency, aides have aggressively resisted the idea that he has become diminished and have tried to change the narrative to whether Mr. Trump tells the truth.
They shielded the president from news media as concerns about his age mounted.
A hallmark of Mr. Biden’s presidency has been the lack of public visibility in situations that aren’t scripted or tightly controlled. According to data from Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, Mr. Biden held 36 news conferences through June 30, fewer than any other president in the same time frame since President Reagan.
Mr. Biden has given 129 interviews, compared with Mr. Trump’s 369 and President Obama’s 497 during the same period. One of Mr. Biden’s interviews, with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, was hastily scheduled after the debate debacle.
The American people noticed problems less than 10 months into Mr. Biden’s presidency. A November 2021 Politico/Morning Consult poll revealed that 50% of voters said Mr. Biden was not in good health.
That represented a massive 29-percentage-point shift since October 2020, when voters overwhelmingly said he was in good health.
In the same poll, 48% of voters said Mr. Biden was not mentally fit to serve as president, compared with 46% who said he was. That negative 2-point margin starkly contrasted with the October 2020 poll, when voters said, by a 21-point margin, that he was mentally fit.
The poll was released just weeks after Mr. Biden appeared to fall asleep during opening remarks of the COP26 climate change summit.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told Politico that the findings were the result of the “right-wing disinformation machine.”
By August 2023, the share of voters saying Mr. Biden was too old to effectively serve a second term soared to 75% in an Associated Press/NORC poll, and 60% said he didn’t have the mental capabilities to serve as president.
By February, 86% of Americans said Mr. Biden was too old to serve a second term.
Mr. Paleologos said Democrats didn’t heed the polls’ warnings because they were in denial about what the American public was seeing.
“The reason no one acted on [health concerns] is because there was a feeling the numbers would change and his numbers would flip back to where they were in January 2021 when Biden was highly popular,” he said.
Democrats banked on the debate against Mr. Trump as the moment Mr. Biden’s numbers would rebound, but panic ensued instead.
“The debate was supposed to be an inflection point for the campaign, but the opposite happened, and now time is ticking away, and the situation was made worse,” Mr. Paleologos said.
David Dix, a Democratic Party strategist, said Democrats waited until it was too late to listen to voters’ concerns about Mr. Biden’s age. Mr. Dix said the real failure was a lack of succession planning. Democrats have not had a competitive primary since 2008, before President Obama’s first term.
“The party told everyone it was going to be Hillary in 2016 and Biden in 2020,” he said. “You can’t make up for the exercise that both the candidate and party go through when you have a vigorous and earnest primary. The fact that Democrats haven’t has atrophied their connection to the common, regular voters.”
As voter concerns about Mr. Biden’s age increased, so did his number of memory lapses. The president made headlines in September 2022 when he asked for Jackie Walorski to stand up, even though the House lawmaker had died a month earlier. Immediately after her death, Mr. Biden issued a statement offering condolences and ordered flags lowered to half-staff.
A year later, Mr. Biden bizarrely wrapped up a gun safety speech by declaring, “God save the queen, man.” The White House dismissed questions about his statement by saying he was talking to someone in the crowd.
A gush of memory lapses was revealed in February when special counsel Robert Hur issued a report outlining his decision not to prosecute Mr. Biden for mishandling sensitive government documents. Mr. Hur wrote in his report that Mr. Biden couldn’t recall basic facts of his life, including when his son died or when he was vice president.
He said a jury would view Mr. Biden sympathetically as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Instead of calling for Mr. Biden to step down, Democrats dismissed Mr. Hur as a partisan out to derail the president’s reelection.
Mr. Biden compounded the damage with his performance in a rare 13-minute press conference on the evening the report was released. He confused Egypt’s president with Mexico’s when talking about the war in Gaza. He also created a political problem for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi by saying he had to be persuaded to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
A week before the Hur report, Mr. Biden twice recalled speaking with a European leader who had died years earlier. During a series of fundraisers in New York, Mr. Biden said he had discussed the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol with German Prime Minister Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017. Days earlier, Mr. Biden talked about meeting French President Francois Mitterrand in 2021. The French leader died in 1996.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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