If Joe Biden isn’t in control, who is?

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If you were surprised by US president Joe Biden’s performance last night in the CNN debate against Donald Trump, you have not been paying attention. In fact, you may have been wilfully avoiding the ever-growing amount of evidence that Biden is not fit for office. Was it shocking? Yes. But surprising? No.

What we saw last night was not a debate between peers. It was the beginning of a national-security and constitutional crisis, the likes of which has not been seen in my lifetime. The president of the United States – the most powerful leader in the world – is non compos mentis.

Biden opened with a torrent of Democratic buzzwords, delivered at speed, but somehow also in a tone of voice not much above a whisper. He stared straight ahead, eyes fixed on the camera without blinking, as he gripped the podium for dear life. Both his physical appearance and the words that were tumbling incoherently out of his mouth made it clear that he was in no way in control. Not of his words, not of his person and certainly not of his country.

Trump, on the other hand, was unusually calm and precise. He delivered some biting responses, but for once, the night overall was not about him. Take this exchange, for example, which is worth quoting in full for the sheer absurdity of it. At one point, Biden said:

‘What I’m going to do is fix the tax system. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America. I mean billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 per cent in taxes. If they just paid 24 per cent or 25 per cent – either one of those numbers – they’d raise $500million… billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to wipe out his [sic] debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do – childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, Covid. Excuse me, with um… With dealing with everything we have to do with, uh… Look… If… We finally beat Medicare.’

Trump waited patiently while Biden stumbled his way to the end of his point, and then replied: ‘Well he’s right, he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.’

Any satisfaction a beleaguered American taxpayer might feel at Trump landing such zingers would have disappeared with one look at Biden’s vacant, slack-jawed stare. He looked about as nimble as a fly trapped in amber, as his opponent demolished every garbled, rehearsed talking point he managed to get out of his mouth.

Even on abortion – what should have been his strongest point – Biden was a spectacular car crash. He tried to plead the case for abortion by saying there were ‘a lot of young women’ who have been raped by ‘their in-laws, by their spouses, by their brothers and sisters’.

Call me naïve, but I don’t think sister-on-sister rape – and the resulting offspring – is the national problem that Biden seems to think it is. I’m assuming he ad-libbed that line. I would also question the judgement of whoever programmed what’s left of Biden’s brain to get him to say that other close family members are raping each other to this extent. If that’s the best case the Democrats can make in favour of abortion, then reproductive rights are in serious trouble.

‘I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows either’, Trump said at one point, while Biden gazed in his general direction, mouth agape and brow furrowed. At that moment, whether you love him or hate him, Trump was speaking for the entire nation.

Biden’s performance was so bad that not even the Dem-backing mainstream media tried to defend it. Back in March, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said: ‘I’ve spent a good bit of time with Joe Biden… He’s cogent. He’s better than he’s ever been intellectually… This version of Biden… is the best Biden ever.’

Well, no one is singing that tune today. Like rats from a sinking ship, the Democrats are now abandoning their once dear leader and are trying to pretend his performance somehow came out of nowhere.

Indeed, the media are reporting that party hacks are in a ‘panic’, as if they did not know all along that Biden would fall to pieces without their protective shielding. It’s impossible for me to believe that they did not realise how far advanced Biden’s senility is. It’s just for some reason, at this late stage, they now have the permission to say so.

Don’t let the liars get away with this. Their consistent misrepresentations go back nearly 10 years. They insisted that it was Trump who was senile (and that Trump was a Russian asset who told Americans to inject bleach to fight Covid). In contrast, they told us that Biden was wholesome, smart and well enough to keep the world from falling apart. Only now, at the 11th hour, have they decided to be honest about what millions of regular Americans have suspected for years.

The media’s complicity in the disaster that America now finds itself in must never be forgotten. Or forgiven.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.