The last (presidential) days of Joe Biden

Put a second term aside; an extraordinary article in the New Yorker and videos that show he can barely speak even off a teleprompter raise questions about his fitness for the next six months.

Whatever. Anyway. What-evah.

Lately, Joe Biden has sounded more like a stoned, lisping Valley Girl than the President of the United States.

Alas. He’s not stoned. (Words I never expected to write about him, or anyone.)

Biden’s word-finding and cognitive processing appear to have become so poor that he is regularly unsure of what he’s trying to say or is saying. “Whatever” and “anyway” buy his brain time to catch up. They’re bridges through the nowhere of his mind.

What’s particularly worrisome is not only the frequency of these flubs but that Biden is now having them over and over even when he is reading from a teleprompter. An X user captured the phenomenon during Biden’s speech in Las Vegas this week, noting “He loses track of what he’s saying constantly.”

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(Telling you the truth - about Covid, the mRNAs, Biden, and everything else I can. Join me.)

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These are no longer gaffes. They call into question Biden’s basic ability to think.

Yesterday, in the New Yorker, Dr. Dhruv Khallar wrote he had spoken to nine other physicians and that “almost all were concerned that Biden’s symptoms might go beyond a gradual, aging-related decline.”

The piece uses the word “dementia” only once, not in direct reference to Biden (this is still The New Yorker, a house organ for the elite left). But the physicians clearly worry Biden has diagnosable dementia. They suggested he should receive not merely the short cognitive exam a primary care doctor might offer but a full battery of tests:

Most of the doctors I spoke with said that comprehensive neuropsychological and motor testing, along with imaging, would be needed to secure or dismiss a particular diagnosis. This would involve a suite of tests—administered in the course of hours, possibly days—that examine a person’s attention, memory, mood, and semantic fluency.

Consider those four categories:

Attention: as many videos - most recently those from his trips to Europe last month - reveal, Biden frequently wanders off on his own if he is not closely managed.

Memory: federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents said it all, calling Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Mood: on Saturday, Biden yelled at Jason Crow, a Democratic House member (and Army veteran) who had challenged him, jabbing at Crow about his “Bronze Star” and adding, “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”"

Semantic fluency: “We finally beat Medicare.”

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Indeed, the New Yorker piece ends by telling us what we already know:

“He’s fading in front of us,” the New York neurologist said. “You don’t need to be a neurologist to see it.”

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(No, you just need eyes. From the NBC News interview last week.)

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Cognitive decline is usually gradual.

Not always, though. As it worsens, it can accelerate, and Biden is clearly well along. Videos of Biden from as recently as 2020 show a man almost unrecognizable today.

Worse, stress has been shown to lead to more rapid decline. Biden has been - to put it mildly - under significant stress, political and personal. (Nearly lost in the news flood of the last month is the fact his only surviving son was just convicted of three federal felonies, and faces another trial this fall.)

Even infections, like Biden’s new bout with Covid, can accelerate decline, probably by provoking an inflammatory immune response that can reach the brain.

In other words, Biden may well become notably weaker in just the next few weeks, much less by election day. A second term might as well be a thousand years away.

Yet in the face of this reality - as well as his political implosion and the fact that most Democrats, from ordinary voters to the most senior elected officials, want him to drop out - Biden insists he will soldier on.

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With each passing day, this attitude looks less like heroism or even noble stubbornness and more like the rantings of a demented old man.

Of course, his family isn’t helping. To say the least. “Dr.” Jill Biden is desperate to keep the trappings of power, and Hunter to, at a minimum, have his legal bills paid.

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(Telling the truth. With your help.)

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But all the wishing in the world on or off MSNBC cannot change the fact that Joe Biden can now barely finish a sentence. The question should no longer be whether he can run for a second term, it should be whether he is fit to serve through Jan. 20, 2025.

Our President is walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

And, with the nuclear codes in his pocket, taking the world along.