For once, Donald Trump has no words.
On Monday, the president-elect posted a supercut of Democratic officials defending President Joe Biden’s stamina and vision. Left without comment, the video was an apparent jab at accusations embroiling Washington once again this week that journalists and officials were guilty of a “cover-up” of Biden’s decline.
“There is nothing to these challenges that he is not sharp and he is not capable,” of being president for four more years, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) says at one point in the video Trump posted.
But two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal released a damning report describing how Biden’s aides kept the president’s interactions short and tightly scripted—and held other top officials and lawmakers at arm’s-length—allowing his waning energy levels to remain under wraps.
The stark contrast between the energized, detail-oriented Biden his supporters described in the supercut and the struggling, exhausted president who showed up to debate Trump in late June has also led some journalists to rip into their colleagues for failing to cover the story more aggressively.
Asked over the weekend what she thought was the most underreported story of the year, CBS News’ political and legal correspondent Jan Crawford replied, “That would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate.”
Citing the Wall Street Journal report, she continued, “We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats. It could have changed the scope of the entire election.”
Biden has said he was sick during the debate, and the Journal’s report didn’t uncover any evidence of cognitive decline—just a tired old man who should have been relieved to hang up his hat after accomplishing an aggressive policy agenda against long odds.
But the debate laid his limitations bare, and conservatives have been having a field day with first Democrats’ and now the press corps' reckoning.
“Jan Crawford is not going to be popular at the CBS New Year’s Eve party. Let me tell you that right now,” Fox News pundit Kennedy joked on Monday. “She has been red-pilled and my question is, ‘Hey Jan, what took you so long?’”
Trump, meanwhile, is apparently just sitting back and letting other people do the talking for a change.
