"Happy wife, happy life" becomes even more noticeable with the waning of testosterone. Taking stock of my acquaintances, I have noticed that the men who were moderate Republican/ Independent voters 20-30 years ago but who married (usually second time) Democrat wives have all become rabid anti-Trumpers, regardless of of his conservative achievements (e.g. tax cuts and judicial appointments). When it comes to lifelong Democrats like Joe, forget about it.
I would like to hear from anyone who has been part of an organization that for whatever reason had a head guy who wasn’t in charge. I think it happens much more often than we realize. I’ve seen it happen. What I noticed is that various parts of the organization operate on autopilot while the guys with the auto pen have delusions of grandeur while running things into the ground.
I concurr with your description but i must admit it is not a "autopilot" but "self-pilot", i.e. everyone does what it wants because there is no arbiter of the turf war.
I think that is what we are saying. No President truly controls everything. That is why it isn’t as big a deal to put someone like Joe Biden on office. At least in the short term.
I think the most obvious candidates before Biden as being non compos mentis would be Reagan in 1988, Roosevelt in 1945, Wilson in 1920. For Biden it was the whole term for goodness sakes. I’m not familiar with Harding having problems.
Yes, I think this speculation is exactly right. It was Biden's "people" through a whole lot of virtuous groupthink who were running things. The "White House" is a collection of a lot of lower level "political kids" and they run every administration. The only check being that the president usually ultimately has the final say on most matters... but usually he just does whatever the political kids tell him to do.
In the Biden White House, Jill probably interacted with the staff to keep up the ruse that he was in charge, but as long as they respected her as the queen of the castle, they were free to do whatever they wanted in conjunction with the overall goals of the democrat party. And whenever they needed Joe to go out there and make a statement or travel somewhere, he dutifully did and then went back to bed and never made any actual decisions.
Really, more broadly I'd say, and have thought for some time, that the Biden White House was run by the democrat party. There was someone who had control of the autopen and told the local staff what to work on on a day to day basis, probably the Chief of Staff and others near to him, but really policy decisions were made by a cabal of senior democrat politicians (Pelosi, Schumer, to a lesser extent Obama) and Biden's political staff doing whatever the hell they wanted to do in a combination of true believer crap (see the tranny parties etc etc) and pork barrel politics (ie Green New Deal).
That's actually how Biden has conducted most of his career. He's not a Big Man like Tip O'Neil or The Chief like Ronald Reagan. I don't regard him as the Other Trump at all. Biden, Irish law school grad from Delaware, doesn't have nearly the bombast and larger-than-life persona of New York real estate developer Donald Trump. They have radically different career arcs, ancestries, and life histories.
What I find most amusing is the hand-wringing of the leftist journalists about how senile Joe Biden was during his presidency. His senility was obvious for at least the last year. Why didn't the journalists point this out? If a Republican president was senile, the left-journalists would have gone after him like piranhas going after a steer that had wandered into the Amazon. The left-journalists didn't point out Biden's senility because they thought he could defeat Donald Trump until his poor performance in the June 2024 debate.
Had Joe Biden stayed in the 2024 presidential election race and won, you would see these very same left-journalists defending Biden's mental acuity right now.
Biden was senile a lot longer than that - before he stood.
Kamala equally was observably quite incapable as a VP. Not so observable as a Presidential candidate as she only did one interview and the TV station edited that heavily.
We see a 78 year old doing open questions press conferences 3 or 4 times a week now. The gap between him and Biden in 2024 is immense. And many think the current POTUS is short of a few marbles.
I agree that Biden was senile longer than a year but the condition became more acute in 2023-24. In the Fall of 2022, he was still able to give the anti-MAGA speech in the cavern of fire.
In early 2022 Biden had to be shepherded around by the Easter Bunny because he was too confused to function at an egg hunt. Probably for the most important events they pumped him with meds to make him a bit sharper but that stopped working well enough by 2024.
The Resistance Media will claim Trump is senile by featuring some clips of him rambling off-topic, as he is prone to do. The audience that accepts that as evidence doesn't listen to him speak with Joe Rogan for nearly three hours and, while rambling ("the weave") a bit, showing no sign of dementia. Trump 2025 is not as sharp as Trump 2016, but he's no Joe Biden when it comes to mental acuity, energy level, and understanding of national issues and priorities.
Trumps insistence on doing open question press meets almost every day is quite remarkable. Even though he knows they will try to set him up in them - for instance the drink bleach episode where quite intelligent people are convinced they heard him say drink bleach on live TV, rather than something quire different when just chatting with media before the live transmission. Imagine Biden turning up daily, let alone 20 mins before he was live on air.
In fact, journalists did an excellent job detecting the earliest stages of Ronald Reagan's dementia. Some even caught it before his doctors. Some even before it manifested.
Reagan's hearing was not good when he was President. That can affect how others perceive you. Someone reported his hand-written WH journal didn't show signs of problems, but there's always bias. Lawrence Walsh reported memory lapses in '92(?), but like Biden's with Hur, some may have occurred to avoid touchy subjects.
That's kind of the joke I'm making. 1990 was shortly after his term. Reagan was in the early stages of symptomatic dementia by then but my memory is that journalists were calling it years earlier, before a doctor would have diagnosed it.
But surely we can agree that was more a guy who 'lost a step' than someone (like Biden) who was clearly demented. I'm only in my 50s (prime Presidenting age!) and I know I've lost a step in terms of fast comebacks, witty repartee and general smartassery. We like to think we make up for it with wisdom, patience, and perspective.
I don't think that's as good of a metric as you'd hope. I believe doctors try to diagnose this on an absolute scale. But what you actually want is a diagnosis relative to yourself in the past, not one relative to the average 75-year-old.
This is actually a question Scott probably knows quite a bit about.
I was taught that smarter people can evade diagnosis longer because the dementia tests only catch you when you're pretty bad on the mental status exam. Hilariously, one of the questions on the exam is usually "do you know who the president is?" Reagan probably would have got Reagan correct. The question might not have been fair to Biden. :)
This is Reagan's last press conference. He is definitely an old man who speaks a bit slowly, but he's nowhere near as incapacitated as Biden was/is (even 2020 Biden). Imagine Biden doing a real press conference last December! He would have melted.
He did look his age, and that was in spite of him always having fantastic hair. Somehow the contrast between his luxuriant locks and his old guy face didn't do him any favors in terms of looking youthful.
> If a Republican president was senile, the left-journalists would have gone after him like piranhas going after a steer that had wandered into the Amazon.<
Great simile Derek--thanks.
My quibble--like some of the other guys--is that Biden's mental incapability--if not outright senility--was obvious from the get go--i.e. the 2020 election. Covid conveniently covered that a bit. But still the Biden campaign released videos where he sounded incoherent. Stuff they chose as their best available, so the reality must have been worse. Biden's medical handlers did a good job with the drugs to have him ready for the debate and then Trump gave him a free ride by being Trump--i.e. an asshole. Mostly Biden had the media's cover fire.
Biden got the nomination because the Wall Street money guys were scared of actual finance-looting critics like Sanders or Warren getting in and Biden's campaign people were able to use that cash to ride the "Obama's VP" thing to being the pick of blacks. That was enough.
But--even politics aside--by any reasonable standard Biden was utterly unfit for the US presidency on day one. I'd say Trump is both too old and more importantly unfit in terms of narcissism, discipline and intellectual laziness. But I'd say Trump is in the top 5% or so of "near 80" Americans in terms of energy and stamina. Biden was worse than the typical "independent living" resident in my parents' retirement community much less the ones around 80.
I think Biden was too old for a normal presidential campaign in 2020, and benefitted a great deal from covid. But also, he was always gaffe-prone and never a great speaker, which kind of masked things for awhile. I am curious when he actually started showing signs of dementia that were visible to those around him.
Biden’s base seems always to have been lower to middle-class Silent Gen to early boomer Catholics who appreciate his simple existence more than anything else. They remained a powerful voting bloc in 2020-24 and weren’t getting any younger themselves.
Yes, I could see the signs of dementia pretty clearly in 2020. He made many, many errors-confusing one person with another, forgetting where he was, reading teleprompter instructions aloud . . . all brushed off as ordinary errors, but people in good health don’t make those errors time after time. Of course, I had a parent who’d been showing signs of dementia, so I was probably a bit sensitized to it. I’m still amazed that more voters either didn’t see it or voted for him regardless.
> all brushed off as ordinary errors, but people in good health don’t make those errors time after time
On the other hand, those are all normal errors for a person in good health to make. They're just rare.
To know the difference, you have to have a very large amount of close contact with the person, ideally over an extended period. That's not really possible between an audience and a media-managed celebrity.
I remember when I'd been sent to get my grandfather for a birthday party, and most of the way through the journey to our home (not his home), he asked me where we were and what we were doing. He must have trusted me.
If this had been made into a movie, it would’ve bombed at the box office because people would’ve said it was too preposterous and unbelievable.
There were so many bad moves and decisions that I have to think it was a bunch of cooks in the kitchen. I’m sure there were times they were taking ideas from the White House interns, it was all so bizarre.
I can’t dismiss the Obama produced “Leave The World Behind” 2023 movie. It was loud and clear about how no one single person is in charge, as much as we’ve always told ourselves there is.
The night of the 2020 Hew Hampshire primary, Biden came out on stage, turned the wrong way, and stuck his face in the flags at the back. His wife had to put his hand on his shoulder and lead him to the microphone. Nine months after doing that on national television, he was elected president. So if he's still alive in 2028, I don't see any reason why he shouldn't regain the presidency in that year's election.
I agree. Joe's dementia was obvious even during the 2020 campaign.
A relative of mine was dealing with dementia at about that time, and some of the movements and mannerisms Joe displayed way back in 2020 were eerily similar to my relative's. There's also a facial expression of complete emptiness that's characteristic; it would flash on and off Joe's crusty old visage even then.
The thing about these symptoms is that they come and go. My relative would have good hours, even good days, when you could talk to him more or less normally. But he was in no shape to be president.
I pointed all this out to a couple of leftie friends way back in 2020, and they totally, utterly, unequivocally would not believe me. One of them finally admitted after Joe's disastrous 2024 debate that I'd been right all along, and that he'd essentially been in denial.
I hesitate to use the word "dementia," but I agree that it was obvious Biden was not up to the presidency. When he was in his prime, he was dynamic enough to get elected to statewide office in Delaware but not someone who would have been able to make the grade in a larger state. The normal effects of aging were all it took to drag him down from the ranks of small-time local pols who think they have a calling to the White House to the level of an old coot who should not participate in the workforce in any capacity.
Oh sure, like a secret, unelected cabal of White House staffers and senior Cabinet members were the ones actually making policy-level decisions while a befuddled Joe Biden just nodded in agreement during his "up" moments. That's just crazy talk. And the media just went along with it?! LOL just lol. Put on another layer of tinfoil grandpa.
Next you'll be telling us COVID was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology while conducting GOF research funded extra-legally by the NIAID.
The sky's the limit at that point: we actually didn't control any territory in Afghanistan outside downtown Kabul; Ukraine is not actually rolling up the Red Army and sending them back to Moscow; Venezuelan criminal gangs really are taking over apartment complexes.
Soros was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so I’m guessing he was involved.
Overall I’d say nobody was really in charge. It was an administration of incompetentence. Although opening the border on Day 1 seemed like vengeance against the American citizenry for daring to vote Trump into office in 2016. That move looked malevolent and meant to punish and dispossess the middle class.
The unbridled hatred directed at normal white Americans by the Biden administration makes me think that Soros or Obama had a hand in it. It didn't make sense and severely damaged the Democrat brand. Before the 2016 election, Barack said that he would take the election of Trump as a personal rebuke (something like that, I don't have the cite). The Biden administration felt like Obama's revenge--"How do you like them apples, you white MFs?!"
But that kind of hatred is easy to find amongst a wide range of upper-middle-class Americans, most of them white themselves. Was Soros or Obama really needed to stoke it?
I'd say Biden is more the Anti-Trump than the Other Trump.
Yes, they both have big egos, but Trump's is based on great achievement: billionaire developer, media star, political outsider who became President. Biden's only real accomplishment is getting elected and then staying elected for five decades. His legislative record is strikingly thin. Biden's repeated plagiarism and constant lies about his past reveal a deeply insecure man.
Other differences:
Trump has such a good personality that he became the only real estate developer in America who was also a household name. THAT is star power. Biden, by contrast, is just a longtime retail politician. He's good at glad-handing and back-slapping, but then frequently crosses the line to hair-sniffing. In other words, he has little of Trump's magnetism.
Also, Biden is obviously corrupt while Trump has withstood a historically unprecedented effort to find something -- anything -- that could truly compromise him and his business empire.
Finally, Trump has wisdom and good instincts while Biden, as Obama once observed, has an unerring ability to F things up. These two men are not the same.
There were so many ridiculous moments, like the Sleeper giving a rhapsodic threnody to the concept of “black joy” while introducing a “What’s going on here?”-looking Katanji Jackson, that seemed to have come from officially minor-looking Gen Z lanyards.
Remember the day transgenders flashed their mastectomy scars and fake tits on the White House lawn respectively? That does not seem to have emerged from Joey’s old salts. That is some zoomer shit!
My money is on Dr. Jill.
"Happy wife, happy life" becomes even more noticeable with the waning of testosterone. Taking stock of my acquaintances, I have noticed that the men who were moderate Republican/ Independent voters 20-30 years ago but who married (usually second time) Democrat wives have all become rabid anti-Trumpers, regardless of of his conservative achievements (e.g. tax cuts and judicial appointments). When it comes to lifelong Democrats like Joe, forget about it.
I would like to hear from anyone who has been part of an organization that for whatever reason had a head guy who wasn’t in charge. I think it happens much more often than we realize. I’ve seen it happen. What I noticed is that various parts of the organization operate on autopilot while the guys with the auto pen have delusions of grandeur while running things into the ground.
I suppose to some, greater or lesser, extent this is always going to be true!
I am, a public one moreover.
I concurr with your description but i must admit it is not a "autopilot" but "self-pilot", i.e. everyone does what it wants because there is no arbiter of the turf war.
Who was the last president who for sure didn’t really run his White House? Warren G. Harding?
Harding did well to delegate. He is a very underrated president. But one of the least intelligent.
I think that is what we are saying. No President truly controls everything. That is why it isn’t as big a deal to put someone like Joe Biden on office. At least in the short term.
I think the most obvious candidates before Biden as being non compos mentis would be Reagan in 1988, Roosevelt in 1945, Wilson in 1920. For Biden it was the whole term for goodness sakes. I’m not familiar with Harding having problems.
Had a commanding officer that we just ignored and got the job done. He was a loon.
When asked if she’s hungry, my Golden Retriever will eagerly nod assent.
Biden has all Trump's defects with none of his qualities.
Yes, I think this speculation is exactly right. It was Biden's "people" through a whole lot of virtuous groupthink who were running things. The "White House" is a collection of a lot of lower level "political kids" and they run every administration. The only check being that the president usually ultimately has the final say on most matters... but usually he just does whatever the political kids tell him to do.
In the Biden White House, Jill probably interacted with the staff to keep up the ruse that he was in charge, but as long as they respected her as the queen of the castle, they were free to do whatever they wanted in conjunction with the overall goals of the democrat party. And whenever they needed Joe to go out there and make a statement or travel somewhere, he dutifully did and then went back to bed and never made any actual decisions.
Really, more broadly I'd say, and have thought for some time, that the Biden White House was run by the democrat party. There was someone who had control of the autopen and told the local staff what to work on on a day to day basis, probably the Chief of Staff and others near to him, but really policy decisions were made by a cabal of senior democrat politicians (Pelosi, Schumer, to a lesser extent Obama) and Biden's political staff doing whatever the hell they wanted to do in a combination of true believer crap (see the tranny parties etc etc) and pork barrel politics (ie Green New Deal).
This helps explain how the brazenly-titled Inflation Reduction Act became a Titanic-sized barrel of pork.
Imagine your some 30 year old staffer put into that situation.
I smell sitcom!
That's actually how Biden has conducted most of his career. He's not a Big Man like Tip O'Neil or The Chief like Ronald Reagan. I don't regard him as the Other Trump at all. Biden, Irish law school grad from Delaware, doesn't have nearly the bombast and larger-than-life persona of New York real estate developer Donald Trump. They have radically different career arcs, ancestries, and life histories.
Trump’s first term had very few policy initiatives as he did not have an ecosystem of like-minded, organised people to hire from.
This term he does.
What I find most amusing is the hand-wringing of the leftist journalists about how senile Joe Biden was during his presidency. His senility was obvious for at least the last year. Why didn't the journalists point this out? If a Republican president was senile, the left-journalists would have gone after him like piranhas going after a steer that had wandered into the Amazon. The left-journalists didn't point out Biden's senility because they thought he could defeat Donald Trump until his poor performance in the June 2024 debate.
Had Joe Biden stayed in the 2024 presidential election race and won, you would see these very same left-journalists defending Biden's mental acuity right now.
Biden was senile a lot longer than that - before he stood.
Kamala equally was observably quite incapable as a VP. Not so observable as a Presidential candidate as she only did one interview and the TV station edited that heavily.
We see a 78 year old doing open questions press conferences 3 or 4 times a week now. The gap between him and Biden in 2024 is immense. And many think the current POTUS is short of a few marbles.
I agree that Biden was senile longer than a year but the condition became more acute in 2023-24. In the Fall of 2022, he was still able to give the anti-MAGA speech in the cavern of fire.
Well that admittedly would have been more than Kamala could have achieved.
He did always read an autocue remarkably well too.
In early 2022 Biden had to be shepherded around by the Easter Bunny because he was too confused to function at an egg hunt. Probably for the most important events they pumped him with meds to make him a bit sharper but that stopped working well enough by 2024.
Are there meds that help much with dementia?
The Resistance Media will claim Trump is senile by featuring some clips of him rambling off-topic, as he is prone to do. The audience that accepts that as evidence doesn't listen to him speak with Joe Rogan for nearly three hours and, while rambling ("the weave") a bit, showing no sign of dementia. Trump 2025 is not as sharp as Trump 2016, but he's no Joe Biden when it comes to mental acuity, energy level, and understanding of national issues and priorities.
Trumps insistence on doing open question press meets almost every day is quite remarkable. Even though he knows they will try to set him up in them - for instance the drink bleach episode where quite intelligent people are convinced they heard him say drink bleach on live TV, rather than something quire different when just chatting with media before the live transmission. Imagine Biden turning up daily, let alone 20 mins before he was live on air.
In fact, journalists did an excellent job detecting the earliest stages of Ronald Reagan's dementia. Some even caught it before his doctors. Some even before it manifested.
Believe it or not, Richard Nixon noticed about 1990 that Reagan was in mental decline when the two met.
Reagan's hearing was not good when he was President. That can affect how others perceive you. Someone reported his hand-written WH journal didn't show signs of problems, but there's always bias. Lawrence Walsh reported memory lapses in '92(?), but like Biden's with Hur, some may have occurred to avoid touchy subjects.
That's kind of the joke I'm making. 1990 was shortly after his term. Reagan was in the early stages of symptomatic dementia by then but my memory is that journalists were calling it years earlier, before a doctor would have diagnosed it.
Reagan had a bad first debate against Mondale in 1984, looking old and confused. But he came back strong in the second debate.
I suspect that Reagan never really recovered from being shot in 1981.
But surely we can agree that was more a guy who 'lost a step' than someone (like Biden) who was clearly demented. I'm only in my 50s (prime Presidenting age!) and I know I've lost a step in terms of fast comebacks, witty repartee and general smartassery. We like to think we make up for it with wisdom, patience, and perspective.
> before a doctor would have diagnosed it
I don't think that's as good of a metric as you'd hope. I believe doctors try to diagnose this on an absolute scale. But what you actually want is a diagnosis relative to yourself in the past, not one relative to the average 75-year-old.
This is actually a question Scott probably knows quite a bit about.
I was taught that smarter people can evade diagnosis longer because the dementia tests only catch you when you're pretty bad on the mental status exam. Hilariously, one of the questions on the exam is usually "do you know who the president is?" Reagan probably would have got Reagan correct. The question might not have been fair to Biden. :)
Who is Scott?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_puNc2MpCA&t=710s
This is Reagan's last press conference. He is definitely an old man who speaks a bit slowly, but he's nowhere near as incapacitated as Biden was/is (even 2020 Biden). Imagine Biden doing a real press conference last December! He would have melted.
Yes quite lucid, thinking on his feet, taking their questions not prepared questions.
And for 30 mins. Far stronger and smarter than Biden 2020.
Back then he was considered something of a dope or a lightweight, but now 35ish years later into our Idiocracy, he sounds like Pericles lol.
The Reagan Library displays a lot of papers handwritten by him while in the White House: e.g., letters to Gorbachev, that kind of thing.
But he was definitely old. That's a big reason why his movie career fizzled -- he never looked younger than his years.
He did look his age, and that was in spite of him always having fantastic hair. Somehow the contrast between his luxuriant locks and his old guy face didn't do him any favors in terms of looking youthful.
> If a Republican president was senile, the left-journalists would have gone after him like piranhas going after a steer that had wandered into the Amazon.<
Great simile Derek--thanks.
My quibble--like some of the other guys--is that Biden's mental incapability--if not outright senility--was obvious from the get go--i.e. the 2020 election. Covid conveniently covered that a bit. But still the Biden campaign released videos where he sounded incoherent. Stuff they chose as their best available, so the reality must have been worse. Biden's medical handlers did a good job with the drugs to have him ready for the debate and then Trump gave him a free ride by being Trump--i.e. an asshole. Mostly Biden had the media's cover fire.
Biden got the nomination because the Wall Street money guys were scared of actual finance-looting critics like Sanders or Warren getting in and Biden's campaign people were able to use that cash to ride the "Obama's VP" thing to being the pick of blacks. That was enough.
But--even politics aside--by any reasonable standard Biden was utterly unfit for the US presidency on day one. I'd say Trump is both too old and more importantly unfit in terms of narcissism, discipline and intellectual laziness. But I'd say Trump is in the top 5% or so of "near 80" Americans in terms of energy and stamina. Biden was worse than the typical "independent living" resident in my parents' retirement community much less the ones around 80.
You don't want a narcissist for president? I don't see how that's ever gonna happen.
I think Biden was too old for a normal presidential campaign in 2020, and benefitted a great deal from covid. But also, he was always gaffe-prone and never a great speaker, which kind of masked things for awhile. I am curious when he actually started showing signs of dementia that were visible to those around him.
My guess is that Biden was never all that bright.
Biden’s base seems always to have been lower to middle-class Silent Gen to early boomer Catholics who appreciate his simple existence more than anything else. They remained a powerful voting bloc in 2020-24 and weren’t getting any younger themselves.
Yes, I could see the signs of dementia pretty clearly in 2020. He made many, many errors-confusing one person with another, forgetting where he was, reading teleprompter instructions aloud . . . all brushed off as ordinary errors, but people in good health don’t make those errors time after time. Of course, I had a parent who’d been showing signs of dementia, so I was probably a bit sensitized to it. I’m still amazed that more voters either didn’t see it or voted for him regardless.
> all brushed off as ordinary errors, but people in good health don’t make those errors time after time
On the other hand, those are all normal errors for a person in good health to make. They're just rare.
To know the difference, you have to have a very large amount of close contact with the person, ideally over an extended period. That's not really possible between an audience and a media-managed celebrity.
I remember when I'd been sent to get my grandfather for a birthday party, and most of the way through the journey to our home (not his home), he asked me where we were and what we were doing. He must have trusted me.
💔
If this had been made into a movie, it would’ve bombed at the box office because people would’ve said it was too preposterous and unbelievable.
There were so many bad moves and decisions that I have to think it was a bunch of cooks in the kitchen. I’m sure there were times they were taking ideas from the White House interns, it was all so bizarre.
I can’t dismiss the Obama produced “Leave The World Behind” 2023 movie. It was loud and clear about how no one single person is in charge, as much as we’ve always told ourselves there is.
The night of the 2020 Hew Hampshire primary, Biden came out on stage, turned the wrong way, and stuck his face in the flags at the back. His wife had to put his hand on his shoulder and lead him to the microphone. Nine months after doing that on national television, he was elected president. So if he's still alive in 2028, I don't see any reason why he shouldn't regain the presidency in that year's election.
I agree. Joe's dementia was obvious even during the 2020 campaign.
A relative of mine was dealing with dementia at about that time, and some of the movements and mannerisms Joe displayed way back in 2020 were eerily similar to my relative's. There's also a facial expression of complete emptiness that's characteristic; it would flash on and off Joe's crusty old visage even then.
The thing about these symptoms is that they come and go. My relative would have good hours, even good days, when you could talk to him more or less normally. But he was in no shape to be president.
I pointed all this out to a couple of leftie friends way back in 2020, and they totally, utterly, unequivocally would not believe me. One of them finally admitted after Joe's disastrous 2024 debate that I'd been right all along, and that he'd essentially been in denial.
I hesitate to use the word "dementia," but I agree that it was obvious Biden was not up to the presidency. When he was in his prime, he was dynamic enough to get elected to statewide office in Delaware but not someone who would have been able to make the grade in a larger state. The normal effects of aging were all it took to drag him down from the ranks of small-time local pols who think they have a calling to the White House to the level of an old coot who should not participate in the workforce in any capacity.
Oh sure, like a secret, unelected cabal of White House staffers and senior Cabinet members were the ones actually making policy-level decisions while a befuddled Joe Biden just nodded in agreement during his "up" moments. That's just crazy talk. And the media just went along with it?! LOL just lol. Put on another layer of tinfoil grandpa.
Next you'll be telling us COVID was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology while conducting GOF research funded extra-legally by the NIAID.
The sky's the limit at that point: we actually didn't control any territory in Afghanistan outside downtown Kabul; Ukraine is not actually rolling up the Red Army and sending them back to Moscow; Venezuelan criminal gangs really are taking over apartment complexes.
How would we know who or what to trust?!!
They were doing what they were told, same as Biden was supposed to be doing.
By whom?
Mr Sailer, this is beneath you.. you're supposed to be rational minded.
You're starting to sound like one of the kooks, ye' know what I mean ???????
Soros was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so I’m guessing he was involved.
Overall I’d say nobody was really in charge. It was an administration of incompetentence. Although opening the border on Day 1 seemed like vengeance against the American citizenry for daring to vote Trump into office in 2016. That move looked malevolent and meant to punish and dispossess the middle class.
The unbridled hatred directed at normal white Americans by the Biden administration makes me think that Soros or Obama had a hand in it. It didn't make sense and severely damaged the Democrat brand. Before the 2016 election, Barack said that he would take the election of Trump as a personal rebuke (something like that, I don't have the cite). The Biden administration felt like Obama's revenge--"How do you like them apples, you white MFs?!"
Agree. It felt like the Biden Administration was actively hostile to whites.
In the 70s, Biden opposed busing as required to get white suburban Wilmington votes. Like most pols, he believed in nothing but himself.
He certainly did oppose busing. But he probably switched his position later when it couldn't hurt him.
But that kind of hatred is easy to find amongst a wide range of upper-middle-class Americans, most of them white themselves. Was Soros or Obama really needed to stoke it?
Klain and Zients had big roles.
I was surprised to learn, just now, that Klain clerked for Byron White, as distinguished from some less conservative justice.
I'd say Biden is more the Anti-Trump than the Other Trump.
Yes, they both have big egos, but Trump's is based on great achievement: billionaire developer, media star, political outsider who became President. Biden's only real accomplishment is getting elected and then staying elected for five decades. His legislative record is strikingly thin. Biden's repeated plagiarism and constant lies about his past reveal a deeply insecure man.
Other differences:
Trump has such a good personality that he became the only real estate developer in America who was also a household name. THAT is star power. Biden, by contrast, is just a longtime retail politician. He's good at glad-handing and back-slapping, but then frequently crosses the line to hair-sniffing. In other words, he has little of Trump's magnetism.
Also, Biden is obviously corrupt while Trump has withstood a historically unprecedented effort to find something -- anything -- that could truly compromise him and his business empire.
Finally, Trump has wisdom and good instincts while Biden, as Obama once observed, has an unerring ability to F things up. These two men are not the same.
There were so many ridiculous moments, like the Sleeper giving a rhapsodic threnody to the concept of “black joy” while introducing a “What’s going on here?”-looking Katanji Jackson, that seemed to have come from officially minor-looking Gen Z lanyards.
Remember the day transgenders flashed their mastectomy scars and fake tits on the White House lawn respectively? That does not seem to have emerged from Joey’s old salts. That is some zoomer shit!
What about Jill?