On a Saturday night in late April, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) doled out awards, one of which went to Alex Thompson of Axios. The judges said he deserved the award because, “Thompson’s aggressive reporting on Biden, especially leading up to and after the Trump-Biden debate, revealed that the president’s cognitive decline was impacting his ability to do his job, information the White House tried to conceal. After the debate, Thompson was the first to report that Biden was at his best from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — a stunning revelation.”
Thompson’s “aggressive reporting” only started in the fourth year of Biden’s term, and the bulk of it happened after that debate, not before it.
The reporters who actually broke the ice on coverage of Biden’s decline were the Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes. Their June 4, 2024 piece, “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” detailed some of the challenges White House staff faced in propping up a diminishing U.S. president.
Then, of course, came the Titanic of presidential debates on the 24th of June, when Biden’s obvious mental decline was on full display, sinking the Biden presidency.
How Did They Miss This?
Anyone who has had a loved one with serious cognitive issues knows that obvious warning signs reveal themselves over years, not days, weeks or months. And so, by June 2024, a thriving meme ecosphere had robustly grown up around Biden’s deteriorating mental condition. His constant confusion fed an appetite for viral online videos where an American president couldn’t navigate the steps to Air Force One or follow simple stage exiting cues.
Joe Biden’s mental challenges weren’t just fodder for social media. They now seem to have dictated how his 2020 campaign routinely “put a lid” on his schedule early in the day, and how tightly controlled were all of his interactions with the press.
So, if everyone else could see it why didn’t the news media?
In his remarks at the WHCA dinner in April, Axios’s Thompson said, “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception… We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it… We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”
humiliated, screamed at, and shooed, without pushback, from photo ops by Biden staffers.
Faking History
And so in 2025 a new campaign has begun, one designed to create a narrative where the media was duped into thinking Biden was okay, but as soon as it found out it exposed it all.
Perhaps the richest example of this is a book co-authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Thompson titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Apparently, the book relies on interviews with over 200 people with insights as to what the public wasn’t allowed to see. While the book acknowledges a White House cover-up, it distances the media from its own complicity in ignoring or downplaying Biden’s struggles.
In fact, Tapper himself attacked Lara Trump during a 2020 interview when she raised the issue of Biden’s cognitive decline. He accused Trump of mocking a Biden stutter and said she had “no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
The news media now want Americans to believe that they were on top of this story in timely fashion. Books and awards and now a series of exposés from all corners of the journalistic world are taking first crack at a fictional historical narrative that the media hopes will stick.
Can You “Get Ahead” of History?
One of the most common damage-control strategies is to try to get ahead of a negative story. It’s pretty simple. Just break the bad news yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you. That way, you can shape the accepted narrative by being first.
Thinking more long-term, if you want to define the historical record, you have to create a dominant media narrative. Future Americans will consume a historical record defined by repetitive media reports from today, which will be used as source material for books and documentaries, all to suggest that the Biden administration was 100 percent to blame for the deception.
Journalists want to manipulate the public into thinking they fulfilled their duty as members of the Fourth Estate.
This is not healthy for the republic. Conservatives need to set the record straight for the very same reasons the media is working so hard to fictionalize that record. History is at stake. Now is the time for conservatives to make sure the historical record is accurate.
Consider this. If the media, even now, is really interested in the truth, then why are they not asking who actually was in charge when Biden couldn’t competently carry out the duties of the office?
Their silence on this question says all you need to know about “journalistic integrity” in 2025.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
Jesus Christ is King
