President Biden raised eyebrows at the G7 summit in June 2021, just months into his term, with an embarrassing memory lapse that sparked laughter from fellow world leaders.
The leaders of the seven wealthiest nations had gathered in England in what was Mr. Biden’s first major meeting as president with foreign dignitaries. Mr. Biden, who was 78 at the time, publicly chided British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for not introducing the president of South Africa, even though Mr. Johnson already did so by name.
Mr. Biden appeared confused. He bewilderedly looked around the room before mumbling, “Oh, he did?” His words trailed off and the other leaders broke into laughter.
Just weeks earlier, Mr. Biden forgot the name of his secretary of defense. After a few seconds of struggling, the president referred to him as “the guy who runs that outfit over there.”
The incidents were largely brushed under the rug in the U.S. with few news outlets covering the president’s mental misfires. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle ignored it.
Still, these incidents were the first glimpse of a spark that has now erupted into a three-alarm fire engulfing the Democratic Party ahead of the November elections.
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Since Mr. Biden’s confused and sometimes incoherent debate against former President Donald Trump last month, panicked Democrats have called for Mr. Biden to bow out of the presidential race to be replaced with a younger candidate.
Yet questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness to serve were apparent years before the June 27 debate when he struggled to complete his thoughts and stared vacantly. Though Mr. Biden’s deterioration was chronicled by The Washington Times and polls recorded voters’ growing doubts about his fitness for office, the story was rarely reported by mainstream media outlets.
“It makes the media look partisan,” said Richard Benedetto, a former White House correspondent who teaches journalism at American University. “I have no doubt that the White House press corps knew all along that Biden was slipping, but they thought he was a better choice than Donald Trump and looked the other way. We didn’t see any of these stories before the debate.”
David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University, dismissed the idea of a media conspiracy to cover up Mr. Biden’s health because some outlets jumped on the story.
“Look at all the podcasters and people who have looked at it pretty fairly and knew three years ago that Biden was unpopular and knew three years ago that his health wasn’t going to get better,” he said.
Throughout his presidency, Mr. Biden’s aides have pushed back aggressively on the idea that he has become diminished and have tried to change the narrative to whether Mr. Trump tells the truth.
SEE ALSO: Biden campaign brushes off Trump golf challenge, calls it ‘weird antics’
They also shielded the president from the media as concerns about his age mounted.
The lack of public visibility in situations that aren’t scripted or tightly controlled has been a hallmark of Mr. Biden’s presidency. The 36 news conferences he had through June 30, were fewer than any president in the same time frame since President Reagan, according to data from Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition project.
So far, Mr. Biden gave a total of 129 interviews, compared to Mr. Trump’s 369 and 497 by President Obama during the same period of their presidencies. One of those Biden interviews, with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, was hastily scheduled after the debate debacle.
The American people noticed problems less than 10 months into Mr. Biden’s presidency. A November 2021 Politico/Morning Consult poll revealed that 50% of voters said Mr. Biden was not in good health.
That represented a massive 29-point shift since October 2020, when voters overwhelmingly believed he was in good health by a 19-point margin.
The same poll found that 48% of voters believed Mr. Biden was not mentally fit to serve as president, compared to 46% who believed he was. That negative 2-point margin stood in stark contrast to the October 2020 poll when voters believed he was mentally fit by a 21-point margin.
The poll was released just weeks after Mr. Biden appeared to fall asleep during the opening remarks of the COP26 climate change summit.
At the time, Democratic leaders dismissed the results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told Politico that the findings were the result of the “right-wing disinformation machine.”
By August 2023, the number of voters believing Mr. Biden was too old to effectively serve a second term soared to 75% in an Associated Press/NORC poll. Another 60% of voters said Mr. Biden doesn’t have the mental capabilities to serve as president.
By February, 86% of Americans said Mr. Biden was too old to serve a second term.
Mr. Paleolgos said Democrats didn’t heed the polls’ warnings because they were simply in denial about what the American public was seeing.
“The reason no one acted on [health concerns] is because there was a feeling the numbers would change and his numbers would flip back to where they were in January 2021 when Biden was highly popular,” he said.
Democrats banked on the debate against Mr. Trump as the moment in which his numbers flipped back, but after Mr. Biden’s performance suddenly panic ensued.
“The debate was supposed to be an inflection point for the campaign, but the opposite happened and now time is ticking away and the situation was made worse,” Mr. Paleolgos said.
David Dix, a Democratic strategist, said Democrats waited until it was too late to listen to voters’ concerns about Mr. Biden’s age. Mr. Dix said the real failure among Democrats was a lack of succession planning, which blamed on the fact that Democrats haven’t had a competitive primary since 2008, before President Obama’s first term.
“The party told everyone it was going to be Hillary in 2016 and Biden in 2020,” he said. “You can’t make up for the exercise that both the candidate and party go through when you have a vigorous and earnest primary. The fact that Democrats haven’t has atrophied their connection to the common, regular voters.”
As voter concerns about Mr. Biden’s age increased, so did the number of memory lapses. The president made headlines in September 2022 when he asked for the late Rep. Jackie Walorski to stand up, even though she had died a month earlier. At the time of her death, Mr. Biden issued a statement offering condolences and lowered the flags to half-staff to honor her passing.
A year later, Mr. Biden bizarrely wrapped up a gun safety speech by declaring, “God save the Queen, man.” The White House dismissed questions about his statement by saying he was talking to someone in the crowd.
Memory lapses gushed out into the open in February when special counsel Robert Hur issued a report outlining his decision not to charge Mr. Biden for mishandling sensitive government documents. Mr. Hur wrote in his report that Mr. Biden couldn’t recall basic facts of his life, including when his son died, or when he was vice president.
He said he didn’t prosecute Mr. Biden in part because a jury would view him sympathetically as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Instead of calling for Mr. Biden to step down, Democrats raged against Mr. Hur. They dismissed him as a partisan out to derail the president’s reelection.
Mr. Biden compounded the damage with his performance in a rare 13-minute press conference on the evening the report was released. He confused Egypt’s President with Mexico’s when talking about the war in Gaza. He also created a political problem for Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al Sisi by saying he had to be persuaded to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
A week before the Hur report, Mr. Biden twice recalled speaking with a European leader who had died years earlier. During a series of fundraisers in New York, Mr. Biden talked about discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol with German Prime Minister Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017. Just days earlier, Mr. Biden talked about meeting French President Francois Mitterrand in 2021. The French leader died in 1996.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.