Great lives are defined by only a few moments. Woodrow Wilson spent two decades occupying positions of extraordinary power, but his place in history will always belong to the months he spent in Paris negotiating the end of the First World War. More than a million people celebrated Wilson’s arrival in the French capital, raining flowers from windows and balconies to exalt his vision of a future in which reason and diplomacy might replace the inanity of imperial war. The photographs of that parade retain their power more than a century later—images of a public and president overcome by their belief in a better world. But these portraits of Wilson the hero persist chiefly for the contrast they provide against subsequent reports of the broken man who labored through the peace conference behind closed doors.
“If ever the action of a single individual matters, the collapse of the President has been one of the decisive moral events of history,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote after witnessing Wilson’s performance in person. It turned out that Wilson “was not a hero or a prophet”—merely “a generously intentioned man,” one sadly “lacking that dominating intellectual equipment” demanded by the world stage, a “blind and deaf Don Quixote” easily “bamboozled” by more cynical operators.
Keynes did not know the details of Wilson’s condition, but historians now generally believe that the president had suffered a series of strokes that would continue to visit him over the months to come, eventually leaving him thoroughly incapacitated. Wilson’s wife Edith and his closest advisers desperately concealed his impairment from the public for the remainder of his presidency, though a delusional Wilson still wanted to run for a third term in 1920. That he did not proved an ambiguous mercy. He survived long enough to witness the destruction of everything he had hoped to achieve. The United States rejected the Treaty of Versailles and never joined the League of Nations that Wilson hoped would serve as a peaceful forum to resolve international conflict. The free world’s faith in Wilson had been misplaced.
Wilson’s handlers committed a crime against democracy by hiding his decline, but what President Joe Biden and the leaders of today’s Democratic Party are doing is worse. Wilson’s mental collapse was confusing to the medical professionals of the day and unprecedented in American politics. Biden’s cognitive decline, by contrast, has been slow and predictable, while the consequences of his failure as either candidate or president could not be clearer. Democrats have accurately described Donald Trump as a threat to American democracy and global stability. Gambling on a 2024 candidate who is past his cognitive prime invites chaos into an already violent world.
Questions about Biden’s acuity emerged during the 2020 campaign, and report after report over the past four years has indicated that his age affects his presidential duties. Biden has held fewer press conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan and has become notorious among editors for refusing to be interviewed. But for months, Biden’s allies have insisted that the president remains sharp behind the scenes. His press team has raged against critical reporting on his age, while Democratic Party talking heads have been telling the party faithful that such concerns are a big right-wing disinformation plot.
After Thursday night’s mortifying debate, there can be no question that the White House has been trying to hide Biden’s cognitive condition from the public. This was not so much a bad debate as a devastating revelation. Barack Obama had a bad debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, but Democrats didn’t seriously doubt his ability to do his job. According to a CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, an astonishing 72 percent of the country does not believe that Biden has “the mental and cognitive health to serve as president.” The most demoralized are Democratic Party loyalists—people like Dermot Delude-Dix, a member of the Democratic Committee in South Philadelphia, who told the New York Times the debate was an “unqualified disaster.”
“I feel like his insistence on running for re-election just makes our job, honestly, harder in terms of winning the election, getting out the vote in Philadelphia, and winning Pennsylvania,” Delude-Dix said.
These people have a right to feel betrayed, and party leaders shouldn’t expect the benefit of the doubt from them on anything else going forward. Who wants to knock on doors or donate their money to people who won’t level with them about their own candidate? And Democratic leaders are still not being straight with the public. After the debate, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–New York), former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D–South Carolina) all issued public statements supporting Biden, while privately expressing “concerns about his viability,” according to NBC News.
For eight years, Democrats have demanded that Republicans stand up to a leader who is patently unfit for the presidency, calling on the press to denounce Trump’s lies and detail his derangement. After Thursday night’s debate, it is clear that many of those same Democrats are incapable of applying that very standard to themselves.
The Biden family itself, meanwhile, appears to have descended into comprehensive delusion. Jill Biden graces the latest cover of Vogue magazine in a $4,990 Ralph Lauren dress, credited with the imperious splash quote “We will decide our future.” On Sunday, the Bidens gathered for a glitzy photo shoot with renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz at Camp David, where they blamed his bad night on advisers and urged their patriarch to see the campaign through.
Glossy photos and finger-pointing won’t win back the political press. The editorial board of the New York Times and what seems like every liberal columnist on its payroll are calling for Biden to drop out of the race. So is the editor of the New Yorker and top names at the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the American Prospect. Trump and Republicans can make do without the mainstream press because the American right subsists on a diet of lies and conspiracy theories. Democratic politicians have to engage their supporters through the reality-based media, where the coverage will get worse, because the facts are genuinely troubling and Biden’s defenders have foreclosed generous interpretations of new developments by making everyone feel duped. Axios is already reporting that Biden is only “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
At a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, over the weekend, Jill Biden celebrated her husband as “a president with integrity and character.” But a leader’s virtue is defined by their most important decisions. A man who deceives the public and wagers the planet’s future in pursuit of personal power is not, in fact, a man of great moral fortitude. Thursday night served as a frightening reminder that Trump is not the only person on earth who cannot be trusted with power.
Biden has been trailing in the presidential polls for months. No sitting president since Harry Truman has polled so badly with such consistency. Biden faced an uphill reelection battle before the debate; almost any candidate would be stronger in its aftermath. Even if he somehow squeaks out a victory in November—what then? Biden’s mental state will invite aggression from bad actors and generate confusion at the highest levels of American government. Do the president’s words have the force of law after 4 p.m.? Who can be trusted to make what decisions when? Asking the public to vote for a man who cannot, in fact, serve as its leader requires real contempt for democracy.
Woodrow Wilson likely did not recognize the early stages of his impairment and almost certainly could not comprehend the full weight of its consequences. Biden and today’s Democratic Party are better situated. They can still salvage his legacy. The images from the debate will not be forgotten, but they do not have to define Biden’s life. By leaving the presidential race and passing the torch to the next generation of Democratic leaders, Biden can give democracy a fighting chance. If he continues with his campaign, he will be remembered as a man who was too proud to protect American democracy when it most needed defending, while the enablers in his party will have demonstrated that moral cowardice is a bipartisan American tradition.