Campaign aides derided nervous supporters as “bedwetters.” They advised donors to stay calm and “breathe through your nose.” They preemptively dismissed negative polls as the product of “exaggerated media coverage.”
Apparently, President Biden, like so many other presidents, had a run-of-the-mill debate, and the rest of us got to experience a 90-minute senior moment.
This is an incredibly infuriating tactic, not because Biden shouldn’t be president or because he couldn’t win, but because Biden’s supporters seem to be taking inspiration directly from the lazy demagogues who oppose them.
I empathize wholeheartedly with Biden. We all age. We all face death. It must be very hard to face this publicly and have old friends talk about it like a dirge, especially when you feel like you still have some energy left. The word I heard from someone who cares about the president was “humiliating.”
But we’re talking about the fate of a nation, not the dignity of one human being. And I’m angry at campaign aides who think they can stop this by scaring patriotic Americans into submission. I would call it “gaslighting,” if I didn’t loathe it as a trendy cliché.
It’s much the same way Biden and his team have handled the age issue ever since he began considering running again. For the past few years, the president’s aides have acted as if they were living in a Harry Potter sequel called “Joe Biden and the Invisibility Cloak.”
They controlled Biden’s public time, limiting it to scripted events, eschewing serious, in-depth interviews, and embracing zany memes that portrayed Biden as a superhero. Two years ago, in a New York Times article written by my former colleague Peter Baker, one of Biden’s top aides, Mike Donilon, described Biden as someone who would stay up all night churning out policy ideas, the kind of thing that would keep a junior aide awake on plane rides. That seemed incredible even then.
The problem here (as several of us have repeatedly pointed out) was predictable: Humans have eyes, and they use them sometimes. Inevitably, Biden had to campaign more conventionally than he did in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, when he was younger and less tired. Inevitably, voters would see him on his not-so-good days. What would his aides say then?
Now we know it: They meant to say that Biden was as animated as ever, and that the millions watching at home were just hysterical and easily manipulated.
I say, “You all understand that invisibility cloaks don’t really exist, right? look So, the only person you’re fooling is yourself.
By trying to deceive us, the Biden team is doing exactly what they have always loathed about Donald Trump and sworn to banish him from our politics.
They tell us that the truth is what they say it is, just as Trump drew the largest crowd ever to his inauguration, just as he won the last election, just as the words he said in last week’s debate are true in his mind and nowhere else.
And like Trump’s aides, the Biden team decided to enforce this fiction business by scaring their own allies into thinking it was real. A few prominent Democrats, like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), sounded the alarm after the debate. But most party leaders, including former President Barack Obama, who endured a bad debate himself in 2012 and knows the difference, went along with the “it was a bad night, but there was nothing to see” version of events. These are the same Democrats who have regularly accused Republican leaders of emulating Trump’s unreality, so it’s no surprise.
I don’t know if Biden is good enough, or if he has more good days than bad. All I can say is that the president’s team needs to stop treating everyone else as if they’re hallucinating. Especially since over the last 48 hours or so, more and more Democrats have wavered about Biden and seem at least open to an alternative.
Instead, Biden needs to quickly give a couple of serious interviews in which he can make the case not only that he has the power to beat Trump but also that he still has the strength to hang on for another four years.
Because if they don’t, Biden’s aides are not just belittling their friends: they are violating the democratic norms they claim to cherish so much.
