“A sympathetic, well-meaning, older man with a bad memory.” That subtle yet devastating personal description of Joe Biden (81), made in a report on how he handled state secret documents, has ignited the dormant unrest about the mental capabilities of the American president into a raging fire. Concerns about Joe Biden’s age, rumors about his mental decline and the question of whether he can handle another election campaign – let alone four more years as president and world leader – have moved from bars, kitchen tables and the right-wing corners of the internet to front pages and public furor in the Democratic Party.
On Thursday, the Justice Department published the report by Robert Hur, a Republican lawyer who was appointed a year ago by the Democratic minister to investigate whether Biden should be prosecuted for the possession of state secret documents. Shortly before, about twenty documents from his time as vice president (2008-2016) were found in Biden’s garage and an office that he should not have had in his possession. The find received a lot of attention, partly because former President Donald Trump (2016-2020) took hundreds of pieces from the White House and is now being charged with withholding them.
In terms of content, the report is good news for Biden: researcher Hur advises against prosecution in his case. Biden’s possession of personal notes on Afghanistan does not compare to nuclear weapons data that Trump shared with guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort and lied about to the FBI. But Biden’s exoneration is completely overshadowed by the way Hur sees fit to characterize the president. Biden has, he writes, “reduced faculties and a faltering memory” and “could not remember (…) when his son Beau had died,” in 2015 from cancer.
Vulnerability
In an ad hoc press conference, Biden responded agitatedly to the “inappropriate” descriptions in the report. “How on earth does he dare bring that up,” the president said of Hur’s comment on the anniversary of his son’s death. A day that “no one has to remind me of.” Biden called his memory “excellent” and himself “the most qualified person to lead this country and finish what I started.” He then confused Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president, with Mexico’s.
Polls have long shown what Biden’s main vulnerability is: his age and the flaws that come with it. Even more so than on Israel, migration or the economy, seven in ten voters distrust a president who will be 86 years old at the end of his second term or who will be succeeded in the interim by Vice President Kamala Harris.
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In 2020, Biden suggested that he would be an interim pope: a president who would restore the democratic order in the country in one term and then make way for young talent. But now he is heading for a new nomination on behalf of the Democratic Party without any significant opponents and will again face the equally inevitable Republican candidate Trump (77) in November. Whoever wins will be the oldest US president ever. A record that Biden already has.
Internal Democratic dissatisfaction about this is also calmed after the publication of the 345-page Hur report. Biden’s supporters are falling over each other to defend the president as “fully capable,” “the most qualified candidate” and the savior of the United States. Kamala Harris called the report inaccurate and “politically motivated.” Robert Hur was previously appointed prosecutor in the state of Maryland by Trump. Other Democrats suggested Hur was under pressure and wanted to avoid Republican criticism of his legal conclusion by exploiting the side issue of Biden’s age.
The issue is compared to the way in which then FBI boss James Comey announced the day before the 2016 election that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted for the fact that as Secretary of State she had sent emails via an unsecured private server, but her called it “extremely careless”. According to some, this is partly the reason she lost the election.
Mediocre campaign
However, there are also Democrats who recognize Biden’s fragility and veiledly argue for an alternative. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s campaign strategist and Biden critic, said the president “reinforces the meme that he’s too old” in his press conference. According to him, “the genie is out of the bottle” after Hur’s report. The discussion about Biden’s mental decline can now no longer be stopped.
Within the party there are not only concerns about Biden’s age, but also about the approach to the election campaign. During the corona pandemic in 2020, Biden did not have to go out much to meet voters or fight his unpopular rival. The strategy also seems to be to let Trump dominate the campaign in 2024. In this way, the four-time persecuted Republican reminds voters how terrible he is, seems to be the reasoning from Biden’s campaign team.
Biden seeks little attention and, for example, declined an offer to be interviewed on television this Sunday ahead of the Super Bowl, the most watched sporting event of the year. The official reason is that instead of a full interview, only a few quotes would be broadcast. But the fact is that Biden regularly made mistakes during recent campaign commitments that he did undertake, mainly fundraising meetings to boost the Democratic campaign coffers. In Nevada, he confused French President Emmanuel Macron with his distant predecessor François Mitterrand, who has been dead for almost thirty years. In New York he mixed up former Chancellor Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl. Such a slip of the tongue in an interview would spread virally.
Trump also makes mistakes regularly. For example, in a recent speech he confused his Republican challenger Nikki Haley with former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But such blunders affect the fact-free Trump less than his opponent.
Four years ago, Americans elected a sympathetic, well-meaning older man who had been plagued by a stutter in his youth. The question is whether they can forgive him for a bad memory this year.