National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, calls the massive deception used to hide Joe Biden’s incompetency “a scandal,” and one “that involved one of the three branches of the federal government, the one that invests the most power in one person.”

“This seems to have been going on since 2021,” said Cooke. “This was a conspiracy. It was a cover-up. It was a scandal. . . . If one half of the details in this story are true, the duty of everyone involved was to tell the public, to tell the cabinet, to ask Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment.”

Cooke told listeners to “Think about how the New York Times treated those who said, ‘Biden’s too old. Biden’s lost a step. Biden can’t complete a sentence.’ Now, they fall back on these moralistic-sounding defenses. . . . This reminds me a little bit of the problem that Claudine Gay had when she went before the House. She presented a version of free speech on college campuses that on its own terms is impossible to argue with. The problem was that everyone knew that that’s not how Harvard behaved.”

“So it is here,” Cooke said. “All of the defenses that we hear from the press about how journalism works are fine on their own. It’s just that it’s not how journalism works when the subject is a Republican, and especially when the subject is Donald Trump.”

“Compare the way that the press treated this obvious story with how the press treated the Russiagate nonsense. You can’t stop laughing when you apply those rules to that.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.