Biden Was Never Fit For Office To Begin With

At this point, you would be hard-pressed to find any reasonably informed American who honestly thinks President Joe Biden wasn’t in a state of serious cognitive decline at the end of his term in office. Yet the New York Times has at least two reporters who are willing to pretend they believe this.

On Sunday, the Times ran a piece by notorious Russia collusion hoaxer Charlie Savage and Tyler Pager about the thousands of clemency decisions recorded with autopen in the final days of the Biden administration. The piece is meant, on the surface, to be a defense of Biden and his administration’s use of the autopen.

But anyone who reads the entire article carefully will immediately see that its real purpose is damage control: The Trump White House, Justice Department, and Congress are all investigating the high-profile clemency decisions that came down in the final days of the Biden presidency, and it sure looks like Biden’s top aides were making decisions on their own, without the president’s knowledge.

Despite the article’s framing — “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen” — there’s no evidence presented in the piece that Biden personally authorized any of the last-minute pardons. Indeed, the article states that “Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons … Rather than ask Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as … routine”

The overall picture that emerges from the article is that the entire pardon process was directed by top Biden staffers, not by Biden himself. Emails reviewed by the Times “show that use of the autopen was managed by Mr. Biden’s White House staff secretary, Ms. Feldman. She wanted to receive written accounts confirming Mr. Biden’s oral instructions in the meetings before using it to produce the warrants recording the clemency actions, the emails show.” Those written accounts were drafted by aides who themselves were not in the room when Biden supposedly gave verbal authorization for the pardons, and instead came entirely from Biden’s chief of staff, Jeffrey D. Zients, and Biden’s White House counsel, Ed Siskel.

In other words, Zients and Siskel were running the show, and the only evidence we have that Biden was actually authorizing these pardons is that Zients and Siskel insist that he was, verbally, in late-night, closed-door meetings. And the account of these meetings strains credulity: “At the Jan. 19 meeting, which took place in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, Mr. Biden kept his aides until nearly 10 p.m. to talk through such decisions, according to people familiar with the matter.”

So you’re telling me a president in obvious cognitive decline, who clearly could not function after a certain point in the early afternoon, whose White House regularly called a lid at noon, “kept his aides until nearly 10 p.m.” on his last day in office? I’m sorry, but that’s just not believable. 

What is believable is that Biden’s presidency was run by a faceless syndicate of aides, lawyers, and senior White House staff — the deep state, in other words. And not just in the final days regarding clemency decisions. Early on in the 2020 campaign it was obvious to anyone who cared to pay attention and be honest that Biden wasn’t all there and wasn’t really in charge. He awkwardly hid in his basement instead of campaigning, using Covid as the excuse. Once he took office, Biden’s decline was undeniable. His routine confusion on stage and in formal settings, his physical frailty and penchant for tripping, and his incessant verbal gaffes and nonsense made it obvious that he wasn’t all there.

Biden once repeatedly looked for a dead congresswomen in the crowd at a White House event and called out her name. That was in September 2022 — long before his disastrous debate performance with Trump made it obvious that he was unfit to run for a second term, let alone serve as commander-in-chief. 

All along, the media ran cover for him, insisting anyone who questioned his mental acuity was a conspiracy theorist or acting in bad faith. Some, like CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, have tried to retcon all of this, writing an entire book about how the Biden White House  hid the president’s mental decline and “deceived” the press. For Tapper to co-author such a book is almost pathologically shameless, since he was one of the major media figures who ran interference for Biden by attacking everyone who noticed the president’s decline.

Like nearly everything else about the Biden presidency, the autopen scandal reveals just how far the deep state was willing to go to keep a mentally compromised figurehead in office. They ran a coup against Biden last summer after the debate with Trump, only once it became obvious and undeniable that Biden wasn’t all there.

The New York Times can cite anonymous sources all it wants to try to “contextualize” the use of the autopen at the eleventh hour of Biden’s term, but like Biden’s obvious unfitness for office throughout his presidency, the truth is right in front of us, plain for all to see. His presidency stands as one of the greatest political scandals perpetrated against the American people in a generation, and eventually someone needs to answer for that.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.