As Trump dismantles America, the media obsesses over Biden's brain

I was just about to bemoan a reigning monotony, but The Atlantic's Mark Liebovich spared me. "The story about the former president getting old is getting old" is the subhead of his post, which opens, "Washington is abuzz these days ... [b]ecause apparently, Joe Biden is still really old."

His advanced prostate cancer was news this week. What isn't news is that the former president has, for some time, exhibited symptoms of cognitive decline. Questions swirled about his condition after the June 2024 presidential debate, but affirmative answers have since been coming as serial avalanches — each "informative" answer, suffocatingly identical to the last. The media can't get enough of it. Thus in further pursuit of this "old story," journalistic sleuths are conducting manhunts of elected Democrats and Biden associates, whereupon the suspects' capture they're strapped to a confessional rack and surgically interrogated: What did you know and when did you know it?

But the Biden cognition story's mind-numbing longevity is more than dismaying. It's insulting and harmful. Quite aside from the incontestable truth that the reelection of a President Biden unable to even recognize his veep would have been titanically better for the United States than the alternative, the media's relentless focus on his slipping, out-of-power mind consumes space otherwise properly devoted to the horrifying, nationally destructive reality of what's in power.

If voters would like to know what cognitive decline really looks like in an Oval Office occupant, they need only look a bit back. In September 2024 an Australian newspaper reporter wrote about a Trump campaign event in Flint, Michigan, where he took questions from audience members.

The reporter's purpose was not coverage; instead he wished to convey the immense advantage that Trump derives from journalism's straight-news practice of reducing politicians' full remarks, which can be quite copious, "to just three or four of their most important quotes." In this way "we inevitably make them sound snappier, and more coherent," wrote the paper's Samuel Clench, adding that "no one in recent years has benefited from it more than Donald Trump, a man whose rambling, meandering rhetoric is almost always thoroughly, and quite kindly, compressed."

You might think that kindlier yet was Clench omitting from his story the inescapable observation that Trump, in Flint, Mich., revealed to the reporter a cognitive descent light years beyond anything you'll hear in Joe Biden's 2023 special counsel interviews. But Clench's omission was no act of kindness. Rather than characterizing Trump's seriously degraded state of mind, he chose a straighter path of reportage.

To wit, "I’m going to give you a basic question Mr Trump received, from a friendly voter, during one of his campaign events yesterday, and then transcribe his answer in full, without editing it or cutting it down in any way." Brutal. The voter was a retired nurse. Her question, a simple, expected one: "How are you going to bring down the cost of food and groceries?" Trump's, ahem, answer, eight minutes in length ... No, I won't synopsize it, rather, I'm posting his complete answer, just as Mr. Clench did. While the media obsesses over a former president's mental condition, what follows is what's sitting, and further rotting, in the White House today.

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Good. Very good. Thank you. So we have to start always with energy, always. I don’t want to be boring about it, but there’s no bigger subject. It covers everything. If you make donuts, if you make cars, whatever you make, energy is a big deal, and we are going to get that. It’s my ambition to get your energy bill, within 12 months, down 50 percent. If I can do that, I’ve done a hell of a job. Not 15. Fifty. Interest rates are going to follow, and actually they’re going to follow for another reason. The economy is now not good. And interest rates, you’ll see they’ll do the rate cut and all the political stuff tomorrow, I think. And, you know, will he do a half a point? Will he do a quarter of a point? But the reason is because the economy is not good, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do it. But we’re going to get interest rates down and we have got to work with our farmers. Our farmers are being decimated right now. They’re being absolutely, absolutely decimated. And, you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. And we’re going to have to be a little bit like other countries. We’re not going to allow so much come. We’re going to let our farmers go to work.

And I don’t know if you remember. I love the farmers because, you know, I had many meetings as president. I had this gorgeous room with this beautiful table that seats about 35 people. And I was with the farmers. I, usually, everybody wants something. They all want subsidy. But I was with the farmers. I said, "Look fellas, we’re going to get you such a beautiful subsidy." Meaning I’m going to do things. And one of the people raises and says, "Sir, honestly. We don’t want a subsidy." This is the first time this ever happened to me! Everyone wants, they want money. They want windmills. We want money with these windmills. Ay ay ay. Anyway, but you know what was amazing? He said, almost tears in his eyes, "We don’t, we’re getting decimated. We don’t want a subsidy. We just want a, you know, a fair, level playing field." And I said, I said, "Nobody’s ever said that." And I have many industries and many groups of people from different things. You know, they do all different things. It’s probably the most dramatic I’ve ever seen. He didn’t want anything. All he wanted was to be able to compete fairly. And the reason, the problem we have, is other countries. They treat us very badly, in that way also. They really are. And, you know, sometimes the worst countries are our so-called allies. I say "so-called," because in many ways they are not allies at all. They take advantage of us. They really take advantage. But we’re going to do, with the farmers. We’re going to do what we have to do with the farmers. We’re going to put our farmers. And do you remember the expression, when I was negotiating with China? China said, "Well, we’re not going to deal with this." Because they never had anybody negotiate. They did whatever they want. They just took us like, you know, for a bunch of suckers. But I told the farmers, "It’s going to be, they’re very good negotiators. You’re going to suffer for six months and then they’re going to fold." And that’s exactly what happened. They folded and they agreed to buy $50 billion. You know, you might have heard the story. I said, "How much?" I went to the secretary of agriculture. I said, "How much did they buy?" He said "15." I thought he said 50. "So when they’re ready to make a deal at 15 billion," I said, "No, I want 50." That’s what they’ve been buying. They said, "No, it’s 15." I said, "You said 50?" And he said, "No, we said 15." I said, "That’s OK, ask for 50 anyway." And we got it. We got it. And they buy a lot of our products. So we’re going to, just a great, interest rates, energy and common sense. A lot of it’s common sense, everything. You know, I like to say we’re the party of common sense. We want to have a strong border. How about that? We want a strong, you know all of a sudden, they’ve changed. They didn’t want any border. They said walls don’t work. Two things work. What are the two things? Wheels and walls. You know, if I do, there’s a gorgeous computer down here. In about two weeks, it’s going to be obsolete. A friend of mine is in that business. He hates it. He said, "We come up with a new model and it’s the greatest." About three-and-a-half weeks later, the damn thing is totally obsolete. The only thing that never gets obsolete is a wall and a wheel. And the wall is what we’re talking about now. And you know, we built hundreds of miles of wall. We then added more than I ever said I was going to do. And then we had that bad election result, that disgusting result. And they never put it up. You know what they did with it? They sold it for five cents, and it was expensive wall, it was exactly what the Border Patrol wanted, with the anti-climb plate on top, which I always hated because I didn’t like the look of it. But, you know, they demonstrated. We had mountain climbers, and a couple of drug climbers too. These guys are amazing. They can they put 100 pounds of drugs on their back and they go up the wall like it’s nothing. But they couldn’t get over the plate. So all of a sudden they said, "OK, I’ll put the plate on." I didn’t like it. I liked it better without the plate, but it didn’t work quite as well. So this is what we did. We had it. We had the best. We had a thing called Remain in Mexico. You don’t have to be a genius to know Remain in Mexico is a very good thing. And you think that was easy to get? I think Tijuana, Mexico was probably the fastest growing city in the history of the world. OK? They had hundreds of thousands. They couldn’t come in. When they got in, they let everybody pour into our country, the border. Just to finish with the border. When I talk about energy, to me it’s exciting. But to a lot of people it’s not. But it gets exciting, because we’ll bring down your costs, all that. But what people want to hear, and I believe, when I got elected, I believe it was the border that was the biggest thing. And I fixed it, and I did a great job. And I wanted to mention it in 2020. And my people would say, "Sir, nobody cares about the border." They don’t care because I had it fixed. Now I got to fix it again. I believe the border is of the greatest interest. When you look at, when you look at, when you look at what’s happening in Aurora. OK? Take a look at Aurora. When you look at what’s happening in Ohio, the great state of Ohio, I love it. I’m way the hell up. I wish I was up 18 points in your state. But we are up. We are up. I think when people hear what I have to say, I don’t know how you can possibly lose it. You. I’ll tell you this, and I’ll say this for Michigan. If I don’t win, you will have no auto industry, within two to three years it’ll all be gone. And I know you got a little bit of an increase. It doesn’t mean, that’s the small stuff, because it’s just a temporary thing, because you will not have any manufacturing plants. China is going to take over all of your business, because of the electric car, and because they have the material. We don’t. What we have is a thing called the gasoline. We have gasoline. We have so much gasoline, we don’t know what to do. They don’t have gasoline. So why are we making a product that they dominate? They’re going to dominate. You will not have a car industry left, not even a little bit of a car industry. So, and you’re going to have electric cars, but you’re going to have 7 percent. You’re going to have 9 percent, whatever it may be. And maybe some day, the technology becomes so good that you can do more. I mean, you know, it’s fine. But right now, the battery technology isn’t there for long term. I always say, "I love the electric car, but they don’t go far enough, and they don’t do well." You know, in Iowa, it was 20 degrees below zero, when we had our great success in Iowa, we had a great, and there were cars all over the place. I said, "What’s wrong with those cars?" They don’t work well in cold and they don’t work very well in heat. But Elon’s going to figure it out, because he’s great. He gave me the greatest endorsement. He figures everything out, and right now, he’s got, he’s got other things. He’s got to get a rocket up to get those two people out of there. I said, "Elon, let’s get going." No, they’re relying on Elon to get the two people. Who would like to be up there right now saying, "We’re coming back home maybe in February?" So that was not so good. But Elon will solve the problem. He’s a great, great guy. And he loves this state and he loves your whole, everything you’re doing here. And he’s done a fantastic job. He really has. And if he didn’t endorse me, I would not be saying that. OK? I have a problem. I wouldn’t be saying."

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To correct only one item out of the countlessly inaccurate above, when Trump took office in 2017, China imported $19.1 billion worth of America's agricultural goods. Because of Trump's ensuing tariffs, China's imports plunged to $9.1 billion.

So to cognitive rot, add monumental mendacity. What a combo.