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Politics & Policy
The Opportunistic End of the Biden Cover-Up
Joe Scarborough arrives for a state dinner at the White House in
Washington, D.C., December 1, 2022.(Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Reuters)
S
By Becket Adams
April 6, 2025 6:30 AM
480 Comments
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Now that book deals can be made, the story can be told.
The people who told you there was nothing wrong with former President
Biden are excited to discuss all the ways in which there was absolutely something wrong with former President Biden.
01:29
05:01
Judson Berger
If these people had any capacity for shame, they’d be feeling it about now.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, where host Joe Scarborough boasted not
long before Biden’s disastrous June 2024 presidential debate performance
that “this version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever,” NBC News’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes discussed their new book, which details the lengths to which the former president’s inner circle reportedly went to keep his deterioration a
secret from voters.
Scarborough and his chirpy co-host, Mika Brzezinski, nodded along during
the segment, as if they were mere spectators to the effort to hide the president’s condition and not themselves active participants.
“You know,” said Scarborough, “we always look back in retrospect and think things were a certain way, just because it’s the way the media, at
the time, defined it.”
He added, “I remember after Biden’s shockingly bad presidential debate, that’s when, like, the history books were starting, you know, you could
just see that was going to be the reason why he was pushed out of the
race, and he was doing badly.”
For the record, in the years leading up to Biden’s disgraceful exit from
the White House, even as everyone with working eyeballs could tell you something was definitely wrong with the then-chief executive,
Scarborough assured viewers that the president was fit as a fiddle and
more energetic and vital than men half his age.
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“He’ll wake me up when I’m asleep at 8:30 at night, because Mika and I, of course, wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and I’ll just go. ‘Hello?
Yes, sir,’” Scarborough once bragged. “And about an hour later, he will aggressively and very effectively give me point by point by point about
how my op-ed was flawed.”
In early 2024, Scarborough was especially livid following Special
Counsel Robert Hur’s finding that Biden is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” accusing the special counsel of publishing a “bad-faith” report. Scarborough bragged elsewhere that Biden “exercises every day,” imploring viewers to “look [at] how fit and trim he is.”
If you can believe it, Scarborough’s co-host was somehow worse,
insisting even after the disastrous debate that Biden still had what it
would take to win the general election.
“[He’s] the man for this moment,” she declared, addressing directly the “chorus of Biden doubters.”
“So many draw hope from his empathy and his ability to have perspective,
even right now, and to persevere when he is completely counted out,” Brzezinski pleaded during what would end up being a 15-minute segment
defending Biden’s flailing presidency.
Amazing that Mika Brzezinski wasn’t able to turn the ship around.
Elsewhere in the world of self-serving opportunists is former Biden
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who claims now that he had an idea
during debate prep with Biden last year that the president wasn’t firing
on all cylinders.
Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what
the back and forth was,” Klain told author Chris Whipple for the
forthcoming book Uncharted. Klain also told Whipple he was “startled” by Biden’s lack of focus, including when the then-president bailed on
debate prep to take a nap by the pool; Biden obsessed over foreign
leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; he “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and he “had nothing to say about a second
term other than finish the job.”
Klain had “never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it,” Whipple
writes. “Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign.”
(In separate remarks to Politico, Klain did not dispute the accuracy of
the quotes.)
Yet, you may recall Klain was the one who said in July of last year,
after the debate and after voters had for years correctly called out
Biden’s obvious infirmities, that the “president is absolutely sharp,
fit, on top of his game.”
He added during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (because of
course), “People can see that for themselves . . . sometimes presidents
have bad debates.”
Elsewhere, on CNN, Klain blamed a cold and overseas travel for Biden’s
debate implosion.
More from
Becket Adams
Tim Walz Is None of the Things They Said He Was
Decorum Is Dead
“I don’t deny that it was a bad debate performance; that’s different
than whether or not the president is up to the job,” Klain said. “He’s clearly up to the job. He’s doing it every day. He’s doing it successfully.”
Amazingly, considering what Klain claims now, he also maintained during
his 2024 appearance on CNN that Biden had “done well” in the debate practices.
Speaking of CNN, let’s not forget anchor Jake Tapper, who passed on
covering what was then a national security threat for what now fits more comfortably in the category of palace intrigue.
“Toni Morrison once said, ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,’” Tapper said in a statement announcing the release of a book he co-authored with Axios’s
Alex Thompson. (Note: Alex Thompson deserves special recognition for his reporting on this front. He has been unrelenting and consistent in
covering this story, which is more than can be said for his compatriot.) “That’s what inspired this book: we wanted to know more about what we
all just lived through. More than 200 interviews later, Alex and I have
a much better idea. And soon you all will too.”
Biden’s debate performance was “not an anomaly,” the authors explained, but “the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose faculties
had been diminishing for years.”
See, that’s an interesting thing to hear from Tapper because, in 2020,
after Lara Trump claimed Biden had displayed obvious signs of “cognitive decline,” the CNN anchor was apoplectic, accusing her of “mocking his stutter.”
“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see
you make a comment like that?” Tapper demanded. “I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
Silly Lara Trump.
Didn’t she know you’re supposed to save that sort of material for a book deal — and safely after the fact?
Becket Adams is a columnist for National Review, the Washington
Examiner, and The Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center. @BecketAdams
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