In the wake of the debacle known as the Biden presidency, certain media commentators who supported Biden and looked the other way for a time as he declined cognitively in front of their own eyes and ears, now write critical columns about Biden in an apparent effort to regain relevance and trust as the second Trump presidency is about to begin. It won’t work. Their credibility is gone, hopefully forever.

Two examples of this phenomenon are Brett Stephens and George Will, two conservative writers who succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome and rendered themselves irrelevant to the new conservative movement that propelled Trump into the White House for the second time. (RELATED: National Review Tries To Jump on the Trump Bandwagon)

Stephens, who used to write for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page but now writes a column for the far-left New York Times, recently criticized Biden for “four deceptions” and “four illusions” that will “not serve his legacy well.” The illusions, according to Stephens, were:

1. That the illegal migration on the southern border was “seasonal” and under control.
2. That it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would seize power when America withdrew from Afghanistan.
3. That inflation was “transitory.”
4. That Biden was the best candidate to beat Trump.

The four deceptions were:

1. That he would be a transitional president.
2. That he would be “bipartisan and moderate.”
3. That he was mentally and physically fit to serve a second term.
4. That he would not pardon his son Hunter.

It wasn’t that long ago that Stephens was praising Biden’s foreign policy “accomplishments” in the Middle East, Ukraine, and the Western Pacific. Biden reminded us, he wrote, “of what American moral leadership looks like.” In another column in 2023, Stephens praised Biden’s “experience, foresight, military realism, and political prudence” in conducting foreign policy.

It is true that Stephens also wrote columns critical of Biden on some issues and policies, but let’s look more closely at the most important of the Biden deceptions — his mental unfitness for the presidency. That mental unfitness was evident to people with eyes willing to see and ears willing to hear as early as 2020-2021, but Stephens posed as blind and deaf when it came to Biden’s cognitive decline until May 2024, when he wrote that “perceptions about the president’s physical and mental fitness are hardly baseless,” while also writing that Biden can allay such perceptions if he performed reasonably well in the debate with Trump. We all saw how that went.

But even before the debate, Stephens urged Biden not to run so that the Democrats could field a ticket that could beat Trump. In that column, Stephens did not cite as a reason Biden’s cognitive decline. (READ MORE: The Biden Health Cover-Up Dwarfs the Wilson and FDR Charades)

George Will’s Trump Derangement Syndrome dates back to 2016 when he very publicly left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump’s candidacy. Once a stalwart conservative columnist for National Review, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, Will’s brand of conservatism, as Joseph Sobran once wrote in this esteemed journal, always had a touch of snobby elitism that has only grown worse with age and the arrival of Trump on the political scene. He called Trump in 2016 “a presidential aspirant who would flunk an eighth-grade civics exam.”

In 2019, Will blamed Trump for rendering conservatism undignified. More recently, Will compared Trump supporters to “Deadheads.” Will, like Stephens, voted for Biden in 2020. Yet in 2022, Will urged Biden not to run for reelection because he had suffered episodes of “bewilderment.”

But, like Stephens, Will posed as blind and deaf to Biden’s episodes of “bewilderment” in 2020 and 2021. Will, too, it seems was willing to overlook Biden’s obvious cognitive decline in order to keep Trump from being reelected.

After the debate with Trump, Will stated that Biden will be remembered as “someone who became conspicuously senile in public,” “for vast infrastructure expenditures that produced nothing,” “for unleashing the highest inflation in 40 years,” and “for being swatted down by the Supreme Court for executive overreach.” In that same interview, Will scolded the mainstream media for misleading the American people about Biden — forgetting perhaps that he is a member of the mainstream media who gladly contributed to their every condemnation of Trump.

George Will and Brett Stephens voted for Biden in 2020, ignoring the great James Burnham’s political advice that conservatives should vote for the most rightward electable conservative candidate. (In 2016, 2020, and 2024, that candidate was Donald Trump.) But they also ignored for too long Biden’s obvious mental decline — the very thing they now emphasize in their effort to rehabilitate themselves among conservatives. It won’t work.

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