Noah, I concur that Democratic party’s Biden-related problems “stem from the unfounded assumption that it was so competent, that reporters were so pliant, and that you were so stupid that the president’s party could craft and promulgate its own preferred reality.”

But regarding the Tapper excerpts in the Axios report, I worry less about a president needing to use a wheelchair — FDR and all — and much more about the president’s mental state.

In that context, two anecdotes in the Guardian’s excerpts of Tapper’s book deserve greater scrutiny:

One senior aide, who quit the White House because they did not think Biden should run, admits to the authors that “we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”

First, if you’re afraid of the president’s staff interacting with him, for fear that they will leak that the president has declined so much he can’t perform his duties, then he should not be president. It’s as if everyone around Biden feared his mental decline’s effect on the election, without any fear for his mental decline’s consequences for the country!

The second anecdote(s):

Since at least 2022 Biden has been increasingly prone to lose his train of thought and struggle to remember the names of top aides. His speeches can be incoherent and difficult to hear. When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious.

Hey, remember Stephen Miller’s repeated observations about how often Biden videos featured jump cuts, suggesting that Biden could rarely read two sentences off a teleprompter without error in one take?

Hey, remember when we noticed that in the White House Situation Room, all of the nametags are facing Biden instead of facing out from the speaker? Remember how we speculated that was to help Biden remember the names of his top cabinet officials, and everyone insisted that was paranoid nonsense? Good times, good times.