President Joe Biden's mental acuity has slipped so precipitously that pretty much everyone in the Beltway is sitting up and paying attention -- including the White House.
That's at least one of the takeaways from a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal that used sources in Congress to catalogue the ways that the 81-year-old Biden "shows signs of slipping."
Both Democrats and Republicans participated, with over 45 lawmakers and those in their orbit interviewed over a period of several months, according to the Journal -- and, when the White House found out that the newspaper was investigating the president's declining mental state, it apparently pressured Democrats to boost Biden.
At the outset, writers Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes reported that, during the negotiations on two major big-ticket legislative items, Biden appeared lost.
"When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting," they wrote.
"He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.
"In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened," the story noted.
"Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy."
However, perhaps the most damning assessment came from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“I used to meet with him when he was vice president. I’d go to his house,” McCarthy told the Journal. “He’s not the same person.”
McCarthy detailed his debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, which he said were maddeningly "general" and that, when it came to specifics, the president would merely convey “optimism about working things out.”
“He was going back to all the old stuff that had been done for a long time,” McCarthy said regarding the final stage of negotiations.
“And he was shocked when I’d say: ‘No, Mr. President. We talked about that meetings ago. We are done with that.'”
The White House is vigorously refuting the allegations, as one would expect. Biden isn't the one doing the refuting himself out in front of the cameras, as one would expect he wouldn't. Instead, White House spokesman Andrew Bates was doing the heavy lifting.
“Congressional Republicans, foreign leaders and nonpartisan national-security experts have made clear in their own words that President Biden is a savvy and effective leader who has a deep record of legislative accomplishment,” Bates, apparently with a straight face, told the Journal.
“Now, in 2024, House Republicans are making false claims as a political tactic that flatly contradict previous statements made by themselves and their colleagues.”
Well, let's be clear here -- of the 45 who were interviewed, some of them were, in fact, Democrats.
"Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges," the Journal report noted.
Furthermore, the writers noted that "[t]he White House kept close tabs on some of The Wall Street Journal’s interviews with Democratic lawmakers."
"After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths," the piece noted.
Bates' response to this? “We thought it was important that all perspectives be represented” in order to set the WSJ straight on what he called “false and politically motivated claims.”
Yes, because the idea the president is "slipping" mentally is a partisan concept in no way buttressed by the evidence our lying eyes and ears are producing.
The fact that Biden is no longer in compos mentis isn't a new idea, but congressional insiders describing the painful diminishing mental returns of our 46th president is.
It also comes as polls show Americans are wary of the president's fragile state, Linskey and Hughes reported, with just 28 percent in a March Wall Street Journal poll saying they thought that Biden was a better fit mentally and physically for the presidency than presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is. (Forty-eight percent thought that Trump was a better fit, a gulf of 20 points.)
Moreover, this comes as the White House scrambles to protect the president from himself.
"Americans have had minimal opportunities to see Biden in unscripted moments. By the end of April, he had given fewer interviews and press conferences than any of his recent predecessors, according to data collected by Martha Joynt Kumar, an emeritus professor at Towson University. His last wide-ranging town-hall-style meeting with an independent news outlet was in October 2021," the Journal noted.
It's not just taking the message to the American people. Biden, who previously leaned on his reputation as a congressional deal-cutter during his time in the Senate and the vice presidency, has had fewer meetings with lawmakers every year during his presidency. This went from over three dozen meetings in his first year to about two dozen in his second and just a dozen in his third, according to the Journal.
When reading some of the descriptions of the January Ukraine meeting where Biden was apparently barely audible, it's not difficult to see why.
“You couldn’t be there and not feel uncomfortable,” one attendee told the Journal. “I’ll just say that.”
According to the Journal, Biden frequently passed questions to other lawmakers and staffers, to the point that most at the meeting were talking amongst themselves and not to the guy who sat behind the Oval Office desk, apparently ready to sign or veto whatever Congress sent him.
Furthermore, in a February follow-up with Johnson, Biden appeared unaware that his administration's policy regarding liquid national gas exports was actually, you know, policy. The president reportedly told Johnson that the policy was "only a study," leaving Johnson "dismayed."
“What you see on TV is what you get,” Idaho GOP Sen. James E. Risch told the Journal. “These people who keep talking about what a dynamo he is behind closed doors -- they need to get him out from behind closed doors, because I didn’t see it.”
Good luck with that one. They know what we know and what members of Congress know: This isn't the same Joe Biden, and there's no way to hide it until November. Period.
