The Titanic Sailed at 9:00 Last Night

Now we know what it really felt like sinking into the icy waters

Self-congratulation is unseeming, as Donald Trump relentlessly proves, but there are times when it’s all but unavoidable.

On debate eve, I wrote:

[W]hat polls uniformly show is Biden’s principal weakness: The public knows he’s just too old for the job….If that’s the main impression coming out of this, then, all the substantive policy questions to one side, Trump will have scored a big win.

“Big win” now seems like a pitiful understatement. The Democrats are in a full-blown panic, with no very seaworthy lifeboat in sight (Kamala Harris seems more like a seven year-old’s water-wings).

This is the New York Times’ headline today:

A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party. President Biden’s shaky, halting debate performance has Democrats talking about replacing him on the ticket.

It doesn’t get any better as the Times’ story unfolds:

President Biden hoped to build fresh momentum for his re-election bid by agreeing to debate nearly two months before he is to be formally nominated. Instead, his halting and disjointed performance on Thursday night prompted a wave of panic among Democrats and reopened discussion of whether he should be the nominee at all.

Over the course of 90 minutes, a raspy-voiced Mr. Biden struggled to deliver his lines and counter a sharp though deeply dishonest former President Donald J. Trump, raising doubts about the incumbent president’s ability to wage a vigorous and competitive campaign four months before the election. Rather than dispel concerns about his age, Mr. Biden, 81, made it the central issue.

Democrats who have defended the president for months against his doubters — including members of his own administration — traded frenzied phone calls and text messages within minutes of the start of the debate as it became clear that Mr. Biden was not at his sharpest. Practically in despair, some took to social media to express shock, while others privately discussed among themselves whether it was too late to persuade the president to bow out in favor of a younger candidate.

“Biden is about to face a crescendo of calls to step aside,” said a veteran Democratic strategist who has staunchly backed Mr. Biden publicly. “Joe had a deep well of affection among Democrats. It has run dry.”

Let me take a moment to note the inevitable (it being the New York Times) swipe about the “deeply dishonest…Donald J. Trump.” There was indeed deep dishonesty going on, and not just last night but for months. Still, as Bari Weiss shows, the mendacity came from somewhere else. What Ms. Weiss has to say is long and brutal, but you need to hear it and the country needs to hear it. Donald Trump has his problems with honesty to be sure; Paul and I have been crystal clear about that for a long time. But it’s nothing like this, as Ms. Weiss illustrates:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “fake news,” and, most recently, “cheapfakes.”

Ah yes, the ubiquitous “disinformation.” Those in this administration and the MSM who’ve spent a goodly chunk of their careers telling bald-faced lies about Biden’s fitness acidly accuse you of spreading “disinformation.” (Spreading it, that is, in those few moments you could take off from being a conspiracy theorist).

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance? 

Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous.” The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.” Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job.” Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.” The report does not “live in reality,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things.” 

I have to concede here that I could be on shaky ground criticizing Ms. Harris and Ms. Jean-Peirre, what with their being the first black, female, blah, blah, blah officials to hold their high and well-paid (by you) positions. And, although what they were saying was just spun from wholesale fiction — still, at least it wasn’t plagiarized, unlike another notorious identity hire, Harvard President (well, now former President) Claudine Gay.

Ain’t identity politics grand? Especially in places to which you’ve entrusted your kid’s future and, voluntarily or not, a lot of yours as well.

Here was The New York Times last week in an extensive piece headlined: “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts.” The story went on to attempt to convince readers that “there is the distorted, online version” of Biden, which is merely “a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.” 

With forensic detail, three Times reporters compared these videos from various angles. “Some of the videos of Mr. Biden circulating during this year’s campaign are clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused,” they wrote, pulling clips that were meant to debunk the idea that he was either. Watch them. See for yourself.

When The Wall Street Journal earlier this month came out with a story for which reporters had interviewed 45 people, soberly laying out concerns about Biden’s age, it was trashed as an “egregious hit job.” Some people called for it to be retracted. 

When you control the megaphone nearly 100%, and have grown fat and happy controlling it, you get heady. It’s not just that you can lie till the cows come home (or get sent to Hamas as “humanitarian” filet mignon); you go on indignant offense by calling for the censorship of those even suspected of trying to publish the truth.

“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,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told the WSJ. “Now, in 2024, House Republicans are making false claims as a political tactic that flatly contradict previous statements made by themselves and their colleagues.” 

And even in the midst of last night’s dumpster fire, some stalwarts, like the Japanese soldiers who hadn’t realized they’d already lost the war, tried to spin it. 

“Biden has a cold,” a source close to the president told Axios during the debate. Right, that was the trouble. A lack of Tylenol. 

As soon as I heard at about 11 o’clock last night that someone in the Democratic spin room was saying that Biden had a cold, I knew they understood — although not as well as they would come to understand — that they had a disaster on their hands.

Please, please remember: The people who lied this flagrantly for this long about a matter this important are the ones who for years have been in a righteous rage about how Donald Trump is the danger to the Republic.

Still, it’s worth another moment to return from (a) the Left’s breathtaking dishonesty that’s been going on for months about Biden’s dilapidation to (b) the extent to which that dilapidation puts not just his candidacy but the security of the country in significant question. Changing horses at the Democratic National Convention in August is one thing. Do we need to have a discussion before then about the 25th Amendment?

The journal Persuasion lays it on the line:

Fifteen minutes into the presidential debate, I found myself shaking: stunned by a political meltdown nothing had prepared me for. I imagine millions of us who’ve feared a second Trump term had the same realization at the same time….

In one painful exchange early on, Biden tried to explain his position on Medicare before spluttering. “We've been making sure we are able to make every single person eligible what I've been able to do with the Covid, excuse me, everything we have to do with... look... I finally beat Medicare…”

“I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either,” Trump answered. 

What we just witnessed was the collapse of any pretense that Joe Biden can effectively lead the United States through January 2025, let alone January 2029. Seeing the president stumbling incoherently through half-forgotten answers, jumbling his millions and billions and trillions in his now paper-thin, geriatrically-inflected whisper, then staring into space during Trump’s answers with the vacant look of a long-term care-home resident, my overwhelming urge was to protect him, to jump in somehow and rescue him from the grotesque act of elder abuse he was being subjected to.

Not, of course, that Trump did anything beyond the usual firehose of nonsense and lies. It’s just that what was actually said last night mattered little next to what it revealed about the mental fitness of the sitting president. Trump came across as an older adult with a normal level of cognitive functioning for his age. Biden came across as someone in need of round-the-clock care, able to produce short bursts of relatively coherent political rhetoric before sputtering into foggy incoherence.

This is where we are. As someone who wants to see Biden get the loss this November his rancid policies have earned him, I’m happy. As someone who cares about the everyday safety and security of our country and our people right now, I’m anything but.