Like Hillary and Bernie in 2016, or Grady Little’s decision to send Pedro Martinez back out for the eighth, the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline in 2024 is going to be litigated forever.
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The latest example came Friday night on the “PBS NewsHour,” when Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart why coverage of Donald Trump’s mental state hasn’t matched similar coverage of Biden’s decline two years ago. Here’s how it went down:
Bennett: The press corps spent two years making President Biden’s mental fitness, his acuity the story. Why isn’t that same scrutiny now being applied to President Trump broadly?
Capehart: Yes. Yes, exactly.
That has been my question since — excuse me — since January 20 of last year. We, the press, spent a lot of time talking about President Biden and his age because he looked old. He moved slowly. He wasn’t as vigorous and agile, supposedly, as the guy he pushed out of office and then the guy who was running against him.
And even little slips of the tongue were used to show, see, aha, he’s not all there. He’s losing his mind.
How does that compare to what we’re going through right now? I wish people who have written books — people who have gone on air talking about President Biden nonstop, where are they now? Where are those books now that we have a president who has given ample evidence, ample evidence that something is not right?
I count myself a Capehart fan, but I think he fundamentally misunderstands what was going on then and now. There’s no question that Biden’s mental state became an obsession with the press corps, especially after his disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024, but even before that in the case of Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic.
But why? It was really pretty simple. People in the media were terrified that a diminished Biden would open the door to a second Trump presidency. Indeed, imagine how things might have been different if Biden had stepped aside after the Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in the 2022 midterms, or even six months earlier than he did. I thought Kamala Harris was an excellent candidate in 2024, but an earlier withdrawal could have led to a competitive process that would have made Harris — or someone else — a stronger nominee.
Capehart’s reference to “people who have written books” is a clear reference to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, whose Biden post-mortem, “Original Sin,” has been bashed endlessly on blue social media. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve heard Tapper make his case in long interviews like this. And his fundamental critique of Biden is that he was not up to the task of beating Trump.
And now that Trump is in office, what are the media focusing on? His authoritarianism. His corruption. His unconstitutional foreign interventionism, including what can only be described as war crimes in the Caribbean and Iran. Yes, evidence of Trump’s cognitive and physical problems has been covered, but as a story that is secondary to his wanna-be fascism.
Capehart’s sparring partner, David Brooks, got the better of the argument, noting that “our business model is bashing Trump. We know we can get clicks and ratings if we bash Trump enough. So we do it over and over and over and again, without having anything interesting to say half the time.”
And here’s the key, again from Brooks: “The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. We have been doing this since 2015.”
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I don’t think the “Is Biden too old?” stories lasted two years; it was closer to six months before he withdrew. And they accelerated after people in his own party, on and off the record, shared stories about unsettling interactions with him. If members of the Trump administration start leaking stories about his mental capabilities, the major media outlets will jump at the chance to run stories that can’t be dismissed as opinion or “analysis.”
When I went back and checked in writing this post, I was surprised to see that Mark Leibovich’s “Why Biden Shouldn’t Run in 2024” story was published in June 2022. Klein’s was much later — February 2024 — but still many months before the debate. And both of those pieces did a lot to shape the discourse around Biden.
I thought Brooks especially was harsher on Trump’s mental fitness and evil character than he’d been in the past. But his references to Romans, and Capehart’s to “Article 1” responsibilities were too cerebral. But at least they engaged. The Biden history is a distraction, whereas Trump’s social media posting using the F-bomb and raising the threat of nuclear-level catastrophe, is a turning point, the only question of where it will lead.
We in this country need a CHANGE OF FOCUS NOW: off presidential decrepitude and war as solution and onto what really matters to us all. Hint: it’s NOT a show-off war nor a decrepit leader’s obvious decay! Perhaps a huge change of cultural focus like what happened with Lincoln, Kennedy, MLK. May I suggest THE ARTS: seek for beauty and a new integrity in Creativity itself !!!