A majority of American voters (58%) don’t believe that former President Joe Biden was mentally and physically capable of serving as president during his final year in office, according to a new survey from Napolitan News Service. When it came to Biden’s decision-making, 56% of respondents believed White House staffers were the ones in charge. And to add more insult to the matter, 46% of voters believed he likely knew he had cancer for several years while he was president. When we examine older polls and comments made by the former commander-in-chief, these results aren’t all that surprising. Some suspected all along this was the case, but now, looking back, it’s easy to see how his cognitive decline was either ignored or hidden and that the mainstream media deceptively inked a much rosier picture than reality.
Joe Biden – ‘Sharp as a Tack’
In an interview with Fox News Sunday over the weekend, Axios national correspondent Alex Thompson suggested Mr. Biden’s inner circle “weren’t telling the truth” when they repeatedly claimed he was “sharp,” “focused”, and “detail-oriented.” Thompson, who co-authored the book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again with CNN’s Jake Tapper, said: “They weren’t telling the truth, and I think the book really conclusively shows what was going on behind the scenes.”
“Throughout 2023 and 2024, there were steps taken to increasingly shield Joe Biden – not just from the public, but from members of his own cabinet, members of his own senior staff” he added. “One White House official who left in 2024 told us that they left in part because they were not comfortable with how they were trying to shield the extent of the decline.”
Even when special counsel Robert Hur released his report in February 2024, some Democrats still defended Biden and were triggered by the information released. Hur called Biden “an elderly man with a poor memory.” The then-president had trouble remembering the timeline of the Obama administration, asking “if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?” That was on the first day of the interview, on the second day, Mr. Biden asked, “in 2009, am I still Vice President?”
At the time, the left rushed to the former president’s defense, saying Biden was just tired after hours of grueling questions.
A 2021 Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that voters suspected there were some health concerns for the president. Just 40% of respondents agreed with the statement that Biden “is in good health.” When it came to whether he was mentally fit, 46% said he was. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, told Politico that scrutiny of Biden’s age and cognitive health mostly came from conservative sources. “They’re running a very aggressive campaign on this, and it’s bleeding over into the mainstream a little,” she said at the time, adding:
“By and large, the people who believe this are Trump supporters anyway or they’ve been exposed to the right-wing disinformation machine.”
The Facade Falls
And then, of course, there was the disastrous debate against Donald Trump, when the entire world stood up and took notice of the then-president’s obvious cognitive issues. Horrified Americans – and people across the globe – watched on as Biden stared at the camera, his expression resembling a deer in headlights. This was the president of the greatest nation on Earth, yet he didn’t seem to comprehend much of what was going on. At first, some staunch supporters tried to brush it off as the president suffering from a cold and being tired after long travels. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told MSNBC at the time that the president’s performance “was a setback. But, of course, I believe a setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”
Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, who was also a campaign co-chair for Biden, defended the debate performance, saying: “Joe Biden has an incredible record, and he knows, as the American people do, that when you get knocked down, you get back up and you fight harder. That’s what he’s planning to do.”
Not everyone on the left was fooled, though. A Democratic voter told the BBC after the debate: “I am less confident in the ability of Biden to lead this country today than I have ever been.”
So why weren’t officials, those who knew about Biden’s cognitive issues, speaking out about them? A collection of unnamed sources told various outlets that they were afraid doing so would help Trump win the election. It came down to politics instead of being transparent and giving the American people the truth and facts and allowing them to make informed decisions.
Perhaps that is one reason so many people – 46% of the Napolitan News Service survey respondents – believe that Biden had cancer, and knew about it, for a long time before making the announcement. Or maybe they remember the time he alluded to having cancer back in July 2022. Speaking to an audience about oil refinery emissions near his childhood home in Delaware, he said: “That’s why I and so many other people I grew up with have cancer and why for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.” White House officials later said Biden misspoke.
After the diagnosis was made public, Vice President JD Vance told reporters: “In some ways, I blame him less than I blame the people around him. You can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with the recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there were staffers around the former president, I don’t think he was able to do a good job for the American people. And that’s not politics. That’s not because I disagreed with him on policy. That’s because I don’t think that he was in good enough health.”
The latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that “72% of Likely U.S. Voters believe it’s a serious scandal that White House staffers were aware of Biden’s declining mental condition but worked to conceal his condition from the public and members of Congress.”
For most people, health issues are private and need not be shared with the public. In fact, there are laws protecting that right to privacy. But when it comes to the commander-in-chief of this great nation, the American people have a right to know. Misleading or lying by omission erodes whatever remains of the public’s trust in the government and the media.
