Joe Biden is withering before our eyes

The bar for Joe Biden to clear at yesterday’s NATO summit in Washington, DC could hardly have been set any lower. It was billed as a survive-or-die moment. His last-ditch opportunity to answer his increasingly vocal critics in the Democratic Party. To demonstrate to any doubters that his disastrous debate performance last month was a one-off, not a harbinger of his cognitive decline. All he had to do was speak clearly and coherently, without flubbing his lines, in front of fellow world leaders and the global press. And still he failed. Spectacularly.

The word ‘gaffe’ comes nowhere close to conveying the jaw-dropping, squirm-inducing, downright mortifying moment when the US president introduced President Volodomyr Zelensky of Ukraine – a man Biden described as having ‘as much courage as he has determination’ – as ‘President Putin’ of Russia. To have mixed a key US ally with the man who has violated his nation’s sovereignty, razed its cities to the ground and killed hundreds of thousands of innocents is no ordinary slip of the tongue. It was the most excruciating diplomatic clusterfuck of the century. And the president of the United States made it while he was still reading from an autocue.

There were more howlers to come. Later that evening, the president hosted his first solo press conference since November 2023 (surely itself a hint that all is not right in Camp Biden?). After delivering a long speech from the autocue about the importance of maintaining America’s alliances (not with Putin, to be clear), he took his first question and fumbled it instantly. Pressed on whether he trusted his veep, Kamala Harris, to take over from him in running the White House, he said: ‘Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was not qualified to be vice president.’ Trump / Harris, Zelensky / Putin, what are such minor differences between friends? (Seasoned Biden-watchers will know this is a habit of his. Recently, he confused Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterrand and Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl – Mitterand and Kohl are both long dead and Kohl was not a woman.)

These were just the headline-grabbing gaffes from a disaster-class performance. The president’s voice was hoarse throughout. He continually had to stop to clear his throat. He struggled to keep focussed. At one point he tried to pin his recent stumbles on his aides, blaming them for overloading his schedule and forcing him to work long into the night: ‘I love my staff, but they add things. They add things all the time. I’m catching hell from my wife… Anyway.’

Of course, Biden’s frailty was always obvious to anyone who dared to notice it. The debate merely confirmed the gnawing suspicion that the man who occupied the White House is not fully there. Last night’s presser did nothing to change that.

As ever, it’s the cover-up that stings the most. Evidence of the president’s ill-health was mounting well ahead of that debate. He could be seen freezing and slurring his words at public events. He would struggle to know where he was supposed to walk unless he was chaperoned. Yet all this was dismissed by the White House and its fluffers in the press as Republican propaganda, as the product of misleading ‘cheap fake’ videos.

Never mind that signs of old Joe’s dodderiness were starting to become apparent even ahead of his 2020 presidential campaign. He infamously called a student a ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’, branded a voter ‘fat’ and a ‘damned liar’ and challenged him to a push-up contest, and even forgot Obama’s name (at least he was not frail enough at this point to mix him up with Bin Laden). These gaffes were similarly dismissed as signs of Biden’s folksiness. Joe being Joe. Anyone who feared there might be any cause for alarm about his health was shouted down, accused of spreading far-right fake news.

Even now, after the debate and after Putin-gate, some of Biden’s biggest brown-nosers are still at it. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, clearly a graduate of the Pyongyang school of journalism, felt moved to praise the president’s ‘startlingly impressive command of the issues’ last night. The Washington Post downplayed his foot-in-mouth moments as ‘small stumbles’ in an otherwise adept performance.

We can feel sorry for Joe Biden. No one, not even a man as powerful as the US president, deserves to be humiliated so publicly like this in their twilight years. But we can’t feel anything but contempt for those who pretended – and still pretend – that he is fine. That he’s still as sharp as a tack, still fully in control, still capable of leading the free world. We cannot reject the evidence of our eyes and ears, no matter how hard the Democrats implore us to.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.