The Cost Of Team Biden's Lying

Biden's Party Lost The Presidency. His Country Is Lucky It Didn't Lose More

Normally I don’t write on the weekend, but that Biden interview with special counsel Robert Hur is so stunning I couldn’t stop myself. Did you hear it? Here’s an excerpt:

Listen to it. Seriously, you have to. A transcript can’t convey the full meaning of this exchange. It’s Grampa Simpson stuff — except this senile old man was President of the United States at the time. From a news report:

Newly released audio from then-President Joe Biden’s lengthy interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur captures Biden’s diminished mental acuity in his failure to recall the year his son Beau passed away, the year his vice presidency ended, the year President Donald Trump was first elected, and why he possessed certain classified documents.

Biden’s long pauses and incoherent ramblings in response to light questioning from Hur are apparent in over four minutes of audio first reported by Axios on Friday night. The release fulfills expectations that the Trump administration would finally disclose the long-anticipated interview tape after Biden’s administration obstructed its disclosure at every turn.

The report doesn’t capture the awfulness apparent in the audio. Joe Biden was a very old man who had no business being president. The interviews, which had to do with an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, took place on October 8 and 9 in 2023. As Tyler Austin Harper points out:

As you may recall, the White House trashed the reputations of Special Counsel Hur, its own Attorney General, and Republicans who asked critical questions about it at the time. The strategy of covering up for Biden’s mental frailty kicked into full gear. Friendly media lent a hand:

Harper wrote a piece about the revelations in the new book Original Sin, which autopsies the former president’s catastrophic mental condition, and the high-level coverup, to protect his presidency and re-election campaign. Harper:

The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:

Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.

The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.

“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”

A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.

The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)

One more bit from Harper (who, obviously, is a man of the Left):

Dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties. These people then sought to return Biden to that office for four more years, even if that meant the country would most likely have been quietly run by unelected aides. In a rational world, Congress would hold bipartisan hearings about how this happened and whether and to what extent Biden’s aides hid the truth from the public. Then again, in a rational world, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump—who has spent his first months back in office intentionally dismantling core institutions, flouting the law, and threatening the Constitution—would have been elected president in the first place.

It’s not news to most of us that Biden was non compos mentis for much of his term. Remember this from last year’s G7 Summit?:

It was all so bleeding obvious! And yet … where were the news media? Answer: so afraid that asking important, necessary questions might aid and abet Donald Trump that they let this doddering geezer continue on running the United States of America, without asking basic questions about whether or not he was cognitively fit to do the job!

Michelle Goldberg of the Times doesn’t believe most Democrats — absent the Biden team — were consciously lying to the public. She thinks it might be worse than that:

There was certainly some covering up going on, especially among Biden’s insular inner circle. But more than lying to the public about Biden’s increasing infirmity, I think too many Democrats were lying to themselves. The “original sin” that party leaders now need to grapple with is their tendency toward groupthink, inertia and an extreme and wildly counterproductive risk aversion.

Plenty of Democrats are annoyed that “Original Sin” has catapulted the issue of Biden’s enfeeblement back into the news, threatening to distract voters from Donald Trump’s rococo corruption. I think, though, that Tapper and Thompson have done the party a favor. Some sort of reckoning is due for the disastrous missteps that paved the way for Trump’s return. It’s better for Democrats to rip off the Band-Aid now than to let the issue fester until the next election, and to try to glean some bitter lessons from their collective failure. Party officials burned a lot of credibility defending Biden’s cognitive fitness. As they seek to earn it back, they should be honest about what they got wrong.

Why is lying to oneself worse than lying consciously to others? Because it indicates a basic inability to come to terms with reality. Yesterday I recorded a podcast with John Heers, and mentioned that one of the most formative events of my development as a thinker was having gone all-in for the Iraq War in 2002-03. As you regular readers know, I discovered to my shame, around 2005, that I had been lied to by the Bush government, but more crucially, I had wanted to be deceived. And to put a fine point on it: I didn’t know what I was doing to myself.

It’s like this: I wanted the United States to punish some Arab Muslim SOBs for 9/11. I thought my willingness to believe anything the Bush administration said was evidence of my clear-mindedness and patriotism. I dismissed any questioning, by anybody, as nonsense. This is what is called motivated reasoning. In the 2002 Downing Street memo, British PM Tony Blair learned that MI6 believed that Bush wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” There never will be sufficient recriminations against the Bush people for this lie — though you might say the Trump takeover of the GOP is the recrimination — but that’s not the point here. The point I wish to make is the scandal of so many people like me willing to accept all this uncritically at the time.

So yeah, I really can believe that Washington Democrats missed Biden’s decline, though it was clear to, well, people like me and you. They didn’t see it because they had a powerful, unconscious bias against seeing it. It’s like this: If this is true about Joe Biden, then Donald Trump might beat him in 2024; a Trump restoration is unthinkable; therefore, Biden is fine.

It’s all too human. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five cases known to me in which this kind of motivated reasoning carried the day in various crises — personal and institutional — with seriously bad results. We all are susceptible to this. All of us.

Think about all the fools who fell for the Black Lives Matter organization in the immediate post-Floyd era. That lot were clearly grifters, and later shown to be, but that didn’t stop a hell of a lot of people and corporations from showering them with money. What, you don’t believe in Black Lives Matter? Are you a racist?! To call Ibram X. Kendi a midwit is to exaggerate his intellectual gifts, but that did not stop rich people from falling all over themselves to stuff his pockets with cash to found an “anti-racism center,” which eventually collapsed, taking $43 million with it. The motivation to fight racism, and to be seen as fighting racism, caused people who ought to have been more cautious to suspend their critical faculties.

As awful as the BLM situation was, it wasn’t such a huge deal in the grand scheme. When motivated reasoning manifests in truly important institutions, it can be very, very bad indeed. As usual, my other go-to example (besides the Iraq War) is the Catholic abuse crisis, not because it explains anything particular about the Catholic Church, but because it is a classic example of how motivated reasoning can lead to true catastrophe. The “inner circle” of the Church — bishops, cardinals, the pope — knew what was going on, to some degree, but did nothing about it until their collective hand was forced. One reason they felt no pressure to do anything about it was because so very many Catholics (as I was at the time) simply could not imagine that such a thing could be true. There was evidence — not nearly as much as came out in 2002 and thereafter, but enough to prompt serious consideration by any Catholic who paid attention. But being human beings, most of us didn’t see it — I’m guilty too — because we didn’t want to see it (a point illustrated to some extent in this short clip from the movie Spotlight).

The motivated reasoning became hysterical at times after the scandal broke. If you were around back then, you might remember a Catholic blogger named Mark Shea. He’s declined into gibbering irrelevance now, but back then, he was a big deal, and was often an admirable voice calling for accountability. Even he, though, maintained a ridiculous public stance to explain John Paul II’s inaction in the face of mounting evidence of atrocities. His belief was that JP2 must have some secret plan to fix the scandal. I’m not kidding — he really wrote that, a lot. He had to believe that, to keep the flesh-and-blood pontiff that he loved unsullied by frailty and failure.

Like I said: all of us have done something like this, and are susceptible at all times to it. Realizing this shakes me. For all I learned about my own self-induced gullibility over Iraq, and about the mass self-deception of many Catholics in the first years of the scandal (when so many assumed it wasn’t really that bad, and anyway, the media hates the Church), I am still well aware that it might happen again.

Yesterday I was having drinks with a friend who was telling me about an ex-girlfriend’s mental illness. He said that the hellish thing about this particular condition is that it is almost impossible for those who suffer from it to recognize that something is wrong about their perception of the world. They really do believe that they are perceiving reality, and anybody who challenges that is attacking their identity.

That’s mental illness, but it’s not too far from the way motivated reasoning works. So, conservatives like me in 2002: Critics who say going to war with Iraq is foolish and unjust are either cowards or fools. So, the Democrats in recent years: Republicans who say Biden is senile and incompetent are only doing so to score cheap political points. He’s fine!

How did that work out? According to Original Sin, the liberal Hollywood activist Rob Reiner wasn’t too happy watching Joe Biden choke in his 2024 debate with Trump, and let Kamala Harris’s husband know it:

“We are f–ked!” director Rob Reiner erupted a few minutes into the gathering before taking his anger out on Emhoff: “We’re going to lose our f–king democracy because of you!”

Like many conservatives, I am sorely tempted by Schadenfreude over all this — that is, to take pleasure in the Democrats having to live with the results of their Sleepy Joe kayfabe. Thing is, I can’t shake how damn scary it is that a man as feeble and disconnected from reality as Joe Biden can hold the office of president for years, while not being able to perform. And not only that, but announce that he’s running for re-election. And not only that, but be supported in his delusions by an inner circle who knew well how unfit he was, by a party apparatus that chose not to know, or did not know because of motivated reasoning, and by a media that stayed largely uncurious for the same reason.

What if the country had faced a true crisis?

Look, if it happened once, it can happen again. The reason I react so strongly against the whole stupid “Trump Derangement Syndrome” tic that so many on my side use to dismiss any and all criticism of this president is precisely because I don’t want to make the same mistake I did with the Iraq War. And I don’t want our side to fall into the same blindness-as-loyalty dynamic that took the Democrats down in 2024. I might be wrong in a negative judgment I make about President Trump and his policies, but I don’t want to be the kind of person who discourages himself from thinking critically, and saying what I think. That serves nobody’s ultimate good. Loyalty is usually a virtue, but if it’s loyalty that isn’t first ordered around the pursuit of truth, it can easily be a vice, and not a minor one.

Final point: learning the truth about what Joe Biden was during his presidency, and the Wizard of Oz-like apparatus that shielded the American people from the truth, is but one more thing that makes it hard to trust institutions and their leaders. Remember how we were all instructed to Trust The Science™ around Covid, and to venerate Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins? Remember how we learned much later that they had not behaved in a manner worthy of the people’s confidence? Yesterday I was on the phone with a scientist friend who told me that the entire Covid episode shook his confidence in, well, everything. Though not himself a virologist, he saw the authority of science brought low by the behavior of scientists. And it shook him to the core to see how entire nations could be brought to a standstill because of this stuff.

Hell, I was Trusting The Science™ myself, until leading scientists and medical officials — the same ones who kept us in our homes and wearing masks when we went out in public — said that it was okay for us to gather en masse to protest racism:

But the risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn't keep people from protesting racism, according to dozens of public health and disease experts who signed an open letter in support of the protests.

"White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19," the letter said.

The game was up then.

Thing is, nobody can get through life being mistrustful of everybody else, and every other institution. I might be mad as hell at how medical scientists lied and misled about Covid, but I still do what my doctor tells me to. I routinely bitch about the lies and biases of media, but I still read the papers and take them seriously, if not uncritically. What else is there?

None of us can every know the whole truth about anything. We are fallible. We need to have mercy on those who make bad judgments, but do so in good faith. Where I live, in the ex-Communist world, you hear people talk about a lingering problem in institutional culture in the former Soviet bloc: under Communism, apparatchiks throughout organizations became so afraid of making the wrong decision, and being punished with job loss or even prison for it, that they tended to avoid making decisions at all. A healthy culture is one that holds people accountable for failures, but also shows a certain sense of mercy (within a broader accountability) to those who err.

That said, to fail to interrogate ourselves and our allies, political and otherwise, out of a sense of loyalty, or because we simply cannot bear the consequences of their failure, is to set ourselves up for disaster. It’s bad enough if it happens in your family, your church, your team, your company, what have you. But in the case of Sleepy Joe Biden, the 46th president’s wife, advisers, party, and friendly media subordinated the fate of the United States of America to the perceived good of pretending that Donald Trump’s opponent was not an ambulatory semi-zombie. This is late Soviet stuff. The American president was a freaking invalid, and you have to figure our enemies in Moscow and Beijing knew all about it, even if the American people didn’t.

Makes you wonder what other lies like that we’re being told right now about important leaders and institutions, doesn’t it? We’re not responsible for the lies they tell — but we are responsible for the lies we tell ourselves in service of what we want to be true. Once more, a reminder from Hannah Arendt, which I cite in Live Not By Lies: a key sign that a society is in danger of falling into totalitarianism is when its people cease to care about what is really true, and satisfy themselves with accepting as true whatever agrees with what they wish to believe.