The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden's aides went to great lengths to cover up his cognitive decline, including hiding his condition from the public and even rescheduling meetings when he had 'bad days.' They also manipulated public appearances to avoid highlighting his limitations.
Biden's aides likely felt they had no choice but to proceed, fearing the existential threat posed by Trump. They also believed that stepping back would leave Kamala Harris, who had been unsuccessful politically, as the alternative. Additionally, the incentive structures discouraged dissent, as speaking out could end their careers in Democratic politics.
The media largely dismissed concerns about Biden's cognitive decline, often labeling them as right-wing smears. Journalists like Olivia Nuzzi admitted to knowing about his struggles but failed to report on them earlier. The media also marginalized potential challengers, shutting them out of serious coverage.
Biden's inner circle, consisting of long-time advisors, created a bubble around him, shielding him from negative news and public scrutiny. They rescheduled meetings on his 'bad days' and limited his interactions to avoid exposing his decline. This self-reinforcing system ensured that only positive information reached Biden.
The revelation of Biden's decline raised questions about the Democratic Party's decision-making process and the media's role in vetting candidates. It also highlighted the lack of viable alternatives, as potential challengers like Gavin Newsom and Dean Phillips were sidelined. The situation underscored the party's fear of a democratic process that could have exposed Biden's limitations earlier.
Biden's administration implemented policies that broke with neoliberalism, such as industrial policy, climate initiatives, and labor rights advancements. Figures like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jennifer Abruzzo at the NLRB pushed for antitrust enforcement and worker protections. These shifts were influenced by progressive voices like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
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full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. - We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. - Hey guys, for my podcast with Kyle, I recorded a great interview with Matt Brunig from the People's Policy Project. Got into a lot about healthcare and some of the lies that have been spread recently, but also got his reaction to this new Wall Street Journal reporting about how Biden's aides hit him and lied to the public about the state of his decline.
Enjoy this interview. And if you do like it and want the full thing and to get our interviews every single week, you can subscribe on Substack. We'll have the link down below for you. In any case, enjoy. Matt, I wanted to zoom out a little bit to talk to you about the Biden administration, the legacy. I saw you tweeting about this Wall Street Journal article that just came out where I don't know if you've seen it yet, babe, but they've got all these details of the lengths that his aides went to. Oh, I did see this. To cover up.
his incredible decline. They begin with this anecdote of Michael La Rosa out there touting the first lady, Jill Biden, like her campaign schedule and how she'd been to so many places in Iowa. And the staff was pissed at him because they're like, well, in contrast, this makes Joe Biden look terrible because he can't really do anything. So obviously there's the age and decline part. But I also and I'd love to get your reaction just to that piece, Matt, because you were saying and it is incredible that
They knew all this, and yet they still decided to go forward with him. They still decided, hey, it's a good idea for you to get out there and debate Donald Trump. Like,
None of us can really know what was going on in their minds, but did they just they just didn't think there was any choice but to sort of march, go forward on this death march? Were they setting it up for failure? They did the debate early in case something like this happens. They could try to pull the plug, right? Isn't that the theory? I don't know. What do you what do you read into all of that, Matt? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to figure out the mixture of things, right? Because Biden is making decisions. And so maybe on some level, you know,
If Biden wants to debate, he's going to debate. There's nothing you can do to make him not debate. But the individual staffers also make decisions, right? So that's the part I don't... If I'm an individual staffer and I see the situation as it is, as we all now understand it, why wouldn't I...
do something, say something. I mean, you could resign, you could do whatever, right? To make a big fuss about it. Especially if you think, as so many seem to, that Trump was this sort of existentially, you know, horrible figure that we needed to avoid. And you're going to play this game where somehow we're going to hide Biden, but then he's also going to win an election without what? Because it's not even just the debate, right? That was the singular moment. But
Elections involve tremendous amount of public appearances and interviews and whatever, and you're not going to be able to hide them away from that.
I don't know. I find that whatever the thought process involved in all that, very, very strange. And to say even, okay, well, so we had the debate early. Well, you need to be thinking about this before the primary, right? Because, oh, well, he can bow out after the debate, and then what? We're left with Harris, who at that point had been a very unsuccessful politician. I mean, you know, she's a senator, but presidentially she'd done very, very poorly. So...
Yeah, I don't know. A lot of bad decision making in that realm. They cocooned, Biden's closest aides cocooned him to hide him.
and to protect him from public scrutiny. And then the other people who were in contact with him was probably limited. And then if you think about all the incentive structures, it makes it so that it's just like, hey, shut up, don't say anything. If you resign and you try to virtue signal about how this is a problem, you're immediately gonna be castigated as you're like a right-wing op. You don't have a future in any democratic politics anymore. So like all of the incentive structures are there to just kind of force everybody to...
Don't ask, don't tell, right? It's like a don't ask, don't tell policy. I mean, his circle of advisors has been the same since like 19...
Right. And they're willing to lie for him. They're willing to lie for him and hide his family members. Right. And yeah. And, you know, there's lots of reporting about how he didn't want to hear any negative news. And so they didn't bring him. By the way, Trump was the same way. Right. Like, it's funny that the ego. There are. Yeah, there are some Trumpian characters. I don't hear anything negative. Show me Trump famously. So that would say, show me the good things and have it like on one page and big font.
Like they have to have his name in the briefing in order for him to be like, that's right, Trump. I like this. And since you already have this very narrow circle of longtime advisors established with very few people who have been able to penetrate that in the past couple of years, if you're someone who has any kind of an in, you know that the minute you tell him something he doesn't want to hear, you're out.
And so he surrounds himself with, yes, men and women, and then, you know, creates self creates this bubble. And then that's reinforced by the AIDS desire to hide from the public and even from like cabinet secretaries and members of Congress what's going on. And it's in everybody's self-interest to perpetuate this thing right up into the point where it's not possible. There's an anecdote in here. They say if the president.
President was having an off day. Meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, spring of 2021, 2021 people were talking about here. A national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. Quote, he had good days and bad days and today was a bad day. So we're going to address this tomorrow. Like, so I, it does raise a lot of questions about,
how many people around him knew the state of this decline? And as you said, Matt, like some of them, I guess, maybe earnestly believed what they were saying about Trump being this genuine threat. And yet they're so terrified, I think, of any kind of an actual democratic process that they just like push forward anyway, in spite of really knowing what's going on. I feel like a bigger problem is the media, right? Because it really was on the media to sort of be like,
OK, we got issues here and take the candidates seriously. You know, the people who ran Mary Williamson ran Dean Phillips ran like there were the door was open a little bit. Right. But the media shut them all out, didn't talk about them, made them seem ridiculous. And obviously all the governors who had a chance like Gavin Newsom and all of them, they sort of fell in line and backed off. The midterms were decent. Yeah. But like, don't you I'm I'm curious what you think, Matt, was it was a bigger problem?
the media and this whole thing for not taking challengers to Biden seriously or not doing more reporting or reporting. Yeah, that's the that's the media failure I'd focus on more than anything. I remember Olivia Newsy had a piece
Shortly after, this all went down with the debate where she basically is indicating that she's known that he's had trouble for a while. She's been covering him and she then lays it all out and that's all well and good. But then you look at it and you think, well, Olivia, maybe you should have written about this a year ago when you seem to have indicated you had knowledge of it.
And there had to be a number of media people who had some kind of information about it. It seemed like partially what happened among liberal media is they just decided that this was like a Fox News lie. I remember when there was a... What was it? It was they had a...
a special counsel to investigate... Oh, that's right. Yeah, they classified documents. Something her, Robert Her. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And this dude was like, yeah, he's an old man who means well, but...
damn, his brain is not working. And everybody was like, how dare you, sir? Yeah, yeah. He specifically was saying, look, I don't know if we should bring charges against him for the mishandling of these documents because he's really not there. And I remember, I actually remember Iglesias was so incensed by this. And I thought it was a decent point at the time. I mean, I thought...
you know, to get my cards on the table. I wrote something in Politico in 2020 during the, or 2019 during the Dem primary then that Biden was, his mind was gone. But, you know, it was sort of like, oh, what a clever thing. They couldn't find enough evidence to charge him. So instead they're going to smear him and say that he's just completely gone. And, you know, I don't know, just this sort of desire to think, well, that's a right-wing smear, that's a right-wing smear, that's a right-wing smear, I think kept people from
looking at the reality and reporting it correctly. That happened with Julian Castro. I remember that in the debate. He was like, did you just forget the thing you said five seconds ago? And it was something that us Bernie people at the time were kind of pointing out, like, hey, man, he lost his fastball at the very least. But it was just maybe that's part of the problem is that everybody dismissed it then and he won the election.
So it sort of felt like, well, I guess they were being hyperbolic. If the guy could win, obviously his brain's working good enough. Yeah. And so then but then everybody like time continues. And he got better in one direction. Yeah. One. And there's also there's also a question. I mean, it seems pretty clear that you don't have to be.
fully there cognitively to be president, you know? Apparently. Apparently. This is it.
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So in a way, I could see someone reasoning like, well, who cares? We had Trump and we had Biden. Reagan had Alzheimer's or something. That's right. It's not really that necessary. But the problem is that even though it seems like it
doesn't really it's not strictly necessary when voters realize that you're that way that turns them off so it becomes necessary they don't love like a yeah you having like a bowl of mush what does that say about us as a country that he's right like that people were like yeah
Maybe his brain doesn't work, but like whatever. His strongest defenders at the end were like Bernie and AOC, remember? That was crazy. That was a political calculation is what that was. I mean, I think it was that. But I think also ideologically, like on an idea like we got Lena Khan and this transition. I do want to hear your thoughts, Matt, on kind of like the Biden economic like.
legacy. We got Lena Kahn. We got Jennifer Abruzzo at the NLRB, who was fantastic. You know, we got some industrial policy and a few things that are like a legitimate minor, but legitimate break with the neoliberal era. And with Kamala, you were less likely to get those things. So I do think that was part of the calculus with them, too, is like, I don't really care that his brain is cooked. At least we got Lena Kahn. We also got Gaza.
And that is enough of an excuse for them to tell the truth. Right. Sure. I'm not. Yes. I'm just trying to explain the thinking because it's commonly also give no indication that she was going to break with Biden. He's not stepping down. I've heard him say it a thousand times. He's not going to step down. So everybody just shut the fuck up and accept it. I think that was their thinking.
And they're hedging that if Biden wins, then we'll have his ear because we're the ones who defended him. Yeah, no, I think the – because I remember for a while it wasn't even clear it was going to be Harris that would take over. There was a lot of – when they were saying all that, no one knew what would happen. But I think the assumption there from Bernie World – Bernie specifically, not like his fans –
was, look, Biden very, very clearly is not going to step down. He's made this so clear. So here's a little moment where kind of the center is abandoning him and they're calling on him to step down. We know he's not going to. So what if we kind of, you know, suck up, get close to him? And he did actually adopt some of their policies. I remember in that brief period after the debate, before he dropped out, they got him to endorse national rent control. Yeah.
So, you know, I forgot about that. You would remember that. I totally forgot about that. By the way, to your point, guys.
It's kind of weird that Iglesias was such a big defender of Biden, given that Iglesias has made crystal clear that his politics economically are much more like a Bill Clinton or Barack Obama than a Joe Biden. So why was he such? Shouldn't he have been arguing that Biden has gone too far left on economic issues? You know what I'm saying? Like, it's not even ideologically. They're actually not lined up. Yeah, but he still was like one of his biggest defenders. What do you make of that?
Well, you know, I don't know. Iglesias has a complicated views. You know, he wrote the one billion Americans book, you know. So, yeah. And now he's like, you people like immigration too much.
Hold the phone here, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. He just pretended like he didn't write the book. But I don't know what that is. Matt, how do you see in terms of the economic legacy? You know, it's always difficult to just be like, put aside the genocide. But, you know, on some of the economic pieces.
Do you see Biden as sort of a transitional figure? The parallel that often comes to mind is like a Jimmy Carter who was this transitional figure between the New Deal era and the neoliberal era. And I do think Joe Biden in some ways occupies that same sort of space. How significant do you see some of the breaks being –
you know, from neoliberalism. Do you think, where did that come from? Like, was that just like Ron Klain? Was it Bernie Sanders' influence? Was it just that's where the center of the party was now and sort of where the world is moving? What do you make of some of those pieces? Yeah, so what happened there? I think on the administrative agency front, what seems to have happened with someone like Lena Kahn or Cantor is,
that if you recall in the 2020 primary, um,
Warren kind of didn't really endorse Bernie when she dropped out, which was a little bit of a blow because that was sort of like the left block. It seems like she was given essentially some, I don't know if a literal dispensation for that or what, but she seemed to have been allowed to select the FTC chair and some of these other administrative cabinet level officials. So that seems to be what happened there, right? In the same way that
Buttigieg became Department of Transportation Secretary. Warren's dispensation for her behavior in the election was that she got to pick
So, you know, what did we... It was always very funny. Like, are we talking about Biden administration? Are we talking about Biden himself? Biden himself, his mind is so gone. What do we even... You know, it's always just sort of like which puppet is... Or which puppeteer is running which piece of this puzzle? Yeah, that's so true. The other thing he did would have been kind of run the economy hot. This sort of like macroeconomic stimulus stuff that seemed to be coming out of what was just kind of the consensus...
liberals to progressive opinion on what happened after 2008, which is that Obama did not pass a big enough stimulus and that kept the economy depressed for a decade. And so they're trying to learn the lessons from that. And that, I mean, you could find that pretty much anywhere in any of the kind of
center left to left policy world. And that's where he would have staffed his agency, staffed his administration with those same kind of people, whether it's Center for American Progress, Roosevelt, people like that. So there's that part of it. Industrial policy and then climate, right? So I don't know. These are sort of these strands that he picked up. And it's kind of hard in retrospect to know
how much he was hip to it or what exactly was going on, but it seemed to be he managed to get... The people who managed to control him were people who were, you know, of those various policy sort of persuasions.
One of the things I fear is that the infrastructure bill and the IRA and the CHIPS Act and like the lasting positive implications of that, that that's all going to happen under the Trump presidency. And Trump will just hop in front of that parade and pretend like it was his tax cuts for the rich that did it or something. You know, so it makes me fear that.
Like, you know, a backslide, a potential backslide. We had this debate like long ago about whether or not the neoliberal era was actually coming to an end. And my case was that because of the deleterious impact of money in politics, it basically locks in a sort of neoliberal era because the politicians are always going to default to doing what their donors want them to do, which is always neoliberal. And it makes me wonder, like...
let's assume for a second, a Democrat wins in 2028, which is very possible considering how batshit crazy this administration is going to be. Let's say you get a Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg just to play it safe at the moment, because that's probably one of the more likely things to happen.
Are they going to be more inclined to just revert back to Obama style economics or are they going to be more inclined to either copy a Biden style or potentially even go further than a Biden style? I don't know the answer to that. And I'm curious what you guys think about it. No, the primary is going to be very interesting in this respect. Obviously, I'm on the hunt for who's going to carry the left torch. I assume it's not going to be Bernie this this go around. But that seems like it's, you know, it's going to.
It's really unclear where things are going to go, especially because you had Biden, which did who did one thing. And then as Crystal's pointing out, the the.
Harris and her campaign did something quite different. So even his successor, who was the VP, went a whole other route with it. There seemed to be this blip that for a while in kind of election world that, you know, we need to run it a certain way, focus on a few specific popular issues like abortion access,
whatever, and keep everything, you know, everything else kind of under wraps and tack to the right, be more conservative, say some negative things about immigration, go on TV and pretend like you have a gun and like stuff like that. Like that was like, that was a little moment, but it failed. So, but you know, is it, why did it fail? I don't, I don't know. Like, it's very unclear. Like we don't have a success. Biden is gone.
Harris did something completely different. Obama's way in the rearview mirror. Bernie didn't succeed in the primary. He had a kind of an exciting moment. Like, so who I have no idea. I don't think anyone may. And maybe that's why we're having there's so many debates now about the problem, the groups or was the problem. David Shore, what's the what's the issue? You know, I just hope that they don't take the worst possible lesson, which is like,
Like, how could you run on that $6,000 child tax credit? That was a bad idea. That's way too much money here. I mean, how could you run on that? There's a little bit of that out there. I mean, there is like, I'm sort of, I hate to keep bringing up Matt Iglesias, but one of the points that he and others in his lane are sort of raising is look,
Biden did all this stuff you people wanted them to do. And the economy was unpopular. Like people didn't love it. It wasn't popular. So I guess you were wrong about like supporting labor rights and antitrust policy and like these more, uh,
left-wing type policy ideas. I mean, that is one argument that's being made. Another argument that's being made. Trans people, immigrants. Yeah, just like throw trans people under the bus, adopt Trump's like, you know, hawkish border cruelty. Which she did. Which she did. And obviously didn't work out. But you didn't do it hard enough. Yeah, the moderation on what you might think of as more cultural issues.
type issues if you include immigration and then pared down her she was not economically ambitious she did all those things
But then I think some people, you know, why not? But Matt, back in 2020, she said a thing on a questionnaire in an interview and people still remember that. And so that's why she lost, which I mean, like, obviously, I think this argument is incorrect because also at the same time, when you are at sort of like peak wokeness, Biden wins. So wouldn't you think that the wokeness destroying the Democratic Party would have been a factor at the time when it was at like peak wokeness?
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