We Now Know What Really Happened in Atlanta

Media lied to voters about the cause of President Biden’s subpar debate performance. The lie—described here in full—is unforgivable, and was intended to chill discussion of Trump’s cognitive decline.

---

To subscribe to Proof ($6 a month) and gain instant access to its 275+ exclusive articles and reports across twelve sections of content, click the button below. You can cancel at any time.

---

Summary

Here is what this new Proof report will show, with reliable major-media sourcing:

1. Just 120 days ago, Joe Biden had a full cognitive work-up which showed no abnormal results. Major media had access to this report beginning on March 1 and pretended it did not.

2. Prior to leaving for a long overseas trip in June, President Biden exhibited no cognitive behavior that is unusual for his age. Major media had confirmed this within hours or (at most) days of the Atlanta debate, and either failed to report it, buried it in longer articles intended to suggest something very different about the President of the United States, or else—sadly, this is what happened with most media outlets—continued to report the opposite of the truth to mislead readers.

3. During his trip overseas, President Biden was so committed to working hard for America that he ignored staffers’ advice about resting, undertook a schedule that major media now confirms would be deemed both physically and mentally “grueling” for a man half his age, and yet still exercised daily and came home to America to continue to work long hours. This wholly elective lack of necessary self-care, which to his credit Joe Biden has only blamed himself for since Atlanta, led to him (a) getting a bad cold, (b) needing to take daily afternoon naps, and (c) making several more gaffes than usual in the days immediately preceding Atlanta. His transient ill health was known to his team before the debate, but there was also, it now appears, a universal presumption—almost surely correct—that if it had tried to move the debate or to pre-but any poor performance with a revelation that the president was briefly in a bout of bad health very much of his own making, major media would have skewered him mercilessly. So Team Biden rolled the dice.

4. None of this impacted anything national security-related, either before or after the debate, according to over a dozen sources. In other words, the fear Americans are most likely to have about the cognitive abilities of any U.S. president or candidate for that job are unfounded—as least as to Joe Biden. As to Donald Trump, as we will see below, the fears are very much founded, and have nothing to do with a known cause like an overseas trip during which the man ignored staffers and worked far too hard and too long for a man of any age.

5. Since he got over his cold and got some rest, Joe Biden has been just fine. And that is according to everyone who works with him who’s spoken to major media about it. Moreover, major media has confirmed from countless sources that prior to going overseas in June the president was sharp as a tack, including and perhaps especially in national security briefings and national emergencies—making claims of a longstanding cover-up by MAGA voters and far-right ideologues laughable.

6. In contrast, Donald Trump has been in demonstrated cognitive decline over the last year, and there is no known explanation for it; indeed, the campaign has not even tried to explain it. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Trump and his team, in conjunction with major media, have worked to treat any discussion of this subject as verboten, even though it’s been all over independent media outlets—with video, audio, medical analyses, and more—for months if not more. At the time major media began harping on President Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, progressive dissatisfaction with the lack of coverage of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline had reached a fever pitch. The only way for major media to resolve the situation in its favor was to turn a one-night situation whose causes and implications it quickly understood to be (respectively) transient and virtually non-existent into a bigger story that would at once plump ratings, virtue-signal even-handedness, and put progressive critics back on their heels. It also would punish an administration major media feels angst toward because it’s been far worse for ratings and for subscription models than its incompetent, corrupt, unprofessional predecessor.

So major media knew, in March 2024, from medical reports voluntarily released by the White House, that Joe Biden was in perfect cognitive health. It also confirmed this in offering universal praise for President Biden’s famously vigorous State of the Union address in March. That address was so powerful that the president’s enemies whined—falsely—that he must’ve been placed on performance-enhancing drugs to achieve it, a claim (still false) they would repeat just before the Atlanta debate, so sure were they and their allies in media that President Biden would again deliver a great performance.

Major media was not aware of any event having befallen President Biden that would explain him being in a different cognitive state as June 2024 began than he was in when he got his full cognitive work-up on February 28 or delivered his commanding State of the Union address a week later. Indeed, within a matter of hours after the Atlanta debate it knew, from dozens of sources with knowledge of President Biden’s work inside the White House, that nothing had changed in March, April, or May—Biden was sharp and focused in those months just as he had been at the State of the Union.

Major media knew that, beginning in June, the president had undertaken a schedule during a long trip to Europe that his staffers strongly advised against because it would have led to gross exhaustion—major media has explicitly confirmed—in a man half his age. Major media knew that Joe Biden’s lapses in Europe began as a result of this pre-forecast gross exhaustion, which had been brought on by a president overruling his staff to work harder for America than it would be wise for any president to be working.

Major media knew that, upon return from Europe, President Biden was suffering from exhaustion, a jet lag that wouldn’t go away, and—not surprisingly, soon thereafter—a cold that was so bad it was believed he might have COVID-19. Nevertheless, because President Biden is stubborn and a lifelong “happy warrior,” he insisted on debating Trump just as he’d insisted on keeping a self-avowedly unhealthy schedule in Europe that deprived him of sleep and even intermittent rest.

Major media knew that, ten minutes or so into the Atlanta debate, President Biden realized how poorly things were going and how ill his health was and pushed himself to improve in the final 80 minutes of the debate—which he did, albeit only marginally. Major media ignored this gradual improvement despite knowing most of its viewers were unaware of it, having turned off their televisions in disgust (at both candidates) only a matter of minutes into the Atlanta event.

Major media knew that, within days of the debate, dozens of sources had come out of the woodwork to tell it that the president was now doing fine and was as sharp as ever—information major media had already had confirmed to it simply by watching Biden rallies in North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as well as interviews a now-rested Biden had conducted with both ABC News and MSNBC.

Major media knew, therefore, that there was no story here except a series of bad calls by a sitting President of the United States who was overworking himself for America.

So what did media do, faced with a ho-hum reality but a potential barnstorming lie?

It hid the medical reports it had, and instead pretended that eight trips a Parkinson’s specialist made to the White House in the last eight months—none of which trips had anything whatsoever to do with Joe Biden, but were instead about continued treatment for more than 1,200 patients who receive care via the White House Medical Unit—might in fact be part of an illicit conspiracy to treat the President of the United States for a major illness the reports it already had had already confirmed he wasn’t suffering from.

It told Americans that President Biden’s team’s claims that he had been suffering from exhaustion, jet lag, and a bad cold were all post-debate “spin”—despite every source it had spoken to saying that all of that was in fact true.

It hid flash polls showing that debate-watchers thought President Biden had won on substance, even as Trump won on style. It hid focus group results indicating that the debate hadn’t changed voters’ minds about either candidate. It hid post-debate polls showing that in certain national surveys Biden had gained on Mr. Trump both at the national level and in battleground states—particularly Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, all states Biden campaigned in following the debate. It offered viewers numerous reports it later had to retract about dissent within the party, from an imaginary meeting that was (never) held by Senator Mark Warner to an imaginary call for the president to retire that was (never) issued by Representative Ted Lieu; it treated grumbling by just nine congressional Democrats (out of 260 Democrats now in Congress) as a mandate, even as some of these nine had wavered in their convictions, and bolstered this paltry sum by featuring many former political advisers and former politicians giving their opinions on events in Washington they had no idea about; it selectively aired only clips of President Biden’s very weakest moments at the Atlanta debate, then selectively aired only a clip of his weakest moment at his North Carolina rally, then selectively aired only clips of his weakest moments from his ABC News interview, at no point telling viewers that by then it had learned the entirety of what happened in Atlanta and why (to include Biden having difficulty getting off the stage as a result of a previously publicly disclosed neuropathy in his feet that has nothing to do with cognition but is exacerbated by stress and exhaustion).

And it did all these things while in its twelfth month of ignoring indie-media reports establishing via video, audio, and eyewitness evidence that Donald Trump was and is in the midst of a significant cognitive decline.

---

Introduction

We can all agree that the presidential debate in Atlanta in late June was the worst U.S. political debate ever televised nationally—and that includes the 1992 vice presidential debate. Donald Trump gave the worst Republican Party nominee performance ever, telling 602 lies in 40 minutes of speaking (a volume of derangement that borders on being sufficient for civil commitment); Joe Biden gave the worst Democratic Party nominee performance ever, especially in a halting and befuddled first ten minutes that was all most viewers saw and that traumatized many voters nationwide (even if none of it was nearly as bad when read in transcript form); and the so-called “moderators” selected by CNN, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, so abandoned journalistic principles by failing to conduct any moderation at all that they could easily have been replaced by ChatGPT with no amendment whatsoever to their debate performance.

Indeed, it’s no surprise that an embarrassed CNN was the first news outlet to decide that the Atlanta debate—for the first time in American history—was a turning point in the 2024 U.S. presidential election that really mattered, after many decades of no one much caring about debates at all. This self-aggrandizing, ersatz enthusiasm for the relevance of presidential debates served to shift conversation away from the fact that the worst Republican and Democratic showings ever in a national forum were exacerbated and to a degree enabled by the worst moderation at such an event ever.

{Note: The CNN fact-check of the debate, conducted by Daniel Dale, came well over an hour after the debate was over—when most of the debate’s viewers were asleep. And in that CNN fact-check, which by necessity focused almost entirely on Donald Trump’s lies, and which took several minutes, and which may well have been the longest CNN has ever had to do on-air, the network still only managed to detect 30 of the 600+ lies its moderators allowed Trump to pass on to voters uncontested. Post-factcheck, CNN’s punditry turned conclusively to criticizing Joe Biden, with very few references thereafter to Trump’s unprecedentedly deceitful performance.}

This was, after all, a debate that descended into petty squabbling about which man was the better golfer—yes, really—and it was not the moderators who rescued the event from that nadir but (arguably) the man just convicted of 34 felonies, who must have realized how excessively his toxic hyperbole had infected the debate when he weakly opined, more as a cover-up than an admonition, “Let’s not act like children.”

{Note: The golf debate was, of course, initiated by Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden was likely peeved, as anyone would be, by Trump bringing up two fake golf tournaments he “won” while attacking Biden’s own golf game. Lost to history, now, is the fact that President Biden did not, in fact, immediately rise to Trump’s bait; in retrospect rather ironically, Mr. Biden accurately accused Trump of faking his medical reports, which clearly unnerved Trump because it’s true, and then did no more than agree to Trump’s challenge of a golfing competition before Mr. Trump, likely rattled by the sudden reference to his medical reports, lied—but with his microphone off—about Biden’s golfing handicap, which is indeed, at 6.7, around “six” as the president noted.}

But just as all of the above is beyond dispute, so too is much else. Until CNN and even MSNBC saw fit to try to rescue Kamala Harris’s political reputation as a means of exacting vengeance against Biden for being one-third of the worst political debate ever, there was general consensus in the United States that Americans are not much fond of Kamala Harris, which is why her briefly energetic campaign for president quickly fizzled in 2019. To be sure, VP Harris’s unpopularity is not entirely her fault; she’s a tough, principled, smart, eloquent advocate for her views, and has proven her competence over and over as the top prosecutor and then a United States senator for the world’s fifth-largest economy (California). But that doesn’t mean Americans—even Democrats—have ever shown any interest in voting for her for U.S. president.

They have not.

What we have seen is Republicans use Harris as a GOTV bogeyman, confirming that the MAGAs have long been plotting to try to find a way to make her the Democratic candidate in public perception if not in reality. But they would much prefer the reality.

Why? Because she’s a Black woman, and Donald Trump’s belief that Americans do not want a Black woman to be President of the United States at once is a racism- and misogyny-fueled tenet of faith shared by his followers and something that is possibly, horrifyingly, true. No wonder MAGAs have lied about an imminent Michelle Obama presidency for years now, and frequently claim Joe Biden is being puppeteered by either a Black man (Barack Obama), a Jew (George Soros), or a woman (his wife, Jill).

And the idea that all this would change overnight simply because Kamala Harris is younger than President Biden, when she also happens to be a Black woman in a nation with crippling semiconscious and often conscious biases against Black women, is in fact both preposterous and a nonstarter. While America sees Michelle Obama as a celebrity rather than a politician, and it loves celebrities so much that it currently says it would vote for Mrs. Obama over Donald Trump by 11 points, this is the exception that proves the rule: general-election voters are categorically lukewarm about Black women in politics because of bigotry and misogyny, and anyone who thinks that will suddenly change between June 2024 and Election Day, while America sits under the shadow of an emerging American neofascist reich, is deluded.

We also know that President Biden has been one of the best presidents in American history. How do we know? Because that is the consensus of all nonpartisan historians in America who vote on presidential legacies, and that is what we have to go on with respect to that question.

It isn’t hard to understand how the historians reached their conclusion, however. The reason America has less inflation (yes, really) than almost every other nation trying to work its way out of a once-in-a-century global pandemic is because of Joe Biden’s stimulus bill and Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, two pieces of bipartisan legislation that probably no other president would have even tried to pass in the current political environment, let alone been successful in doing so because so many in D.C. like him.

President Biden understood that America would need a massive spending infusion to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic even better than America recovered (due to President Obama’s wisdom) from the Great Recession of the 2000s. And he was right.

Is the American economy now perfect? Far from it. But President Biden made the right decisions to move America out of a historic danger zone economically, and our economy is now doing well. We have also extricated ourselves from a bloody morass in Afghanistan; seen President Biden’s leadership bring NATO to a point at which it’s stronger than it’s ever been (to include adding two strategically and geopolitically essential nations, Sweden and Finland, to its ranks) and working in almost seamless unity to beat back a Russian invasion of Europe that MAGA Republicans have done much to explicitly and implicitly encourage; counterterrorism efforts in the Middle East have gone exceedingly well; the Biden administration has delivered historic student-debt relief in the midst of a debt crisis that threatens the entire American economy (including those without student debt), even as it has also reduced junk fees that affect all Americans; Obamacare, which tens of millions rely upon but the GOP still aims to destroy, has instead been strengthened; we’ve gotten the first bipartisan gun legislation in decades, and President Biden has not only just put forward a peace plan that could end the horrific war Trump’s pal Benjamin Netanyahu launched in Gaza but also just issued an executive order that has border crossings down by 40%.

And all these accomplishments, and dozens of others it would take too long to itemize here, have come in just three years, amidst the worst polarization in U.S. politics since the American Civil War. That’s why nonpartisan historians rank Joe Biden ahead of Ronald Reagan, ahead of Woodrow Wilson, ahead of Founder James Monroe, ahead of Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant, and well ahead of purported Donald Trump hero (though to be clear, Trump actually knows little of American history) Andrew Jackson.

Trump himself is ranked dead last among all American presidents ever.

This may explain why Americans more or less gave Trump a pass for performing as poorly in a presidential debate as any presidential candidate ever has; it was a last-place performance from a last-place president, and therefore surprised few. In stark contrast, Joe Biden was, in Atlanta, a victim of his own success: a top-notch president had turned in a tied-for-last-place performance, and it unnerved Americans. It stung.

President Biden’s showing was so unlike him that it really did shock the conscience of the nation. It also emphasized how much higher our expectations are for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump, which in itself should tell us that the choice in November is really no choice at all. Indeed, our collective shock at the first minutes of the Atlanta debate—again, few watched beyond the first ten, which is a shame because the sitting president got notably stronger after that point—only confirms that, MAGA memes aside, Americans haven’t thought of Joe Biden as cognitively impaired or physically frail. We might add that MAGAs saying that they were shocked by President Biden’s performance gives the lie to their claim that all he did in Atlanta was present as he always does. It appears that even the MAGAs don’t, and never have, believed what they say about Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities.

Is Joe Biden a stutterer? Yes; he’s been so since childhood. A gaffe machine? Yes; he’s been that for over forty years now. A man who starts to make comments or tell stories and then awkwardly thinks better of it and stops himself? Yes; he’s been doing that since the 2000s, so that too is an habit that couldn’t possibly have surprised anyone when it reappeared in Atlanta. But losing his train of thought in mid-sentence, as he did twice at the debate? That seemed new. As did his frailty and his sotto voce delivery.

Most people watching a surprising performance of this sort would immediately ask an obvious question: is this man sick? And as it turned out, he was. In fact, there were concerns around the time of the debate that he might have COVID-19, though a test came back negative.

Others might ask—again, because of the shock the president’s performance provoked, which tells us no one had seen this sort of behavior from this president before—is this man suffering from exhaustion? And yes, he was; he hadn’t been getting enough sleep in Europe, he had been unable to shake his horrible jet lag following his return to the States, and it appears he had had a recurrence of a persistent neuropathy in his feet (which the Biden White House voluntarily disclosed to major media back years ago, and again this March; it almost certainly explains, along with his exhaustion and his cold, the now-viral gingerness with which he stepped off the debate stage in Atlanta).

But those are Occam’s Razor explanations—sensible, rational explanations for what we all saw with our own eyes and ears.

American major media, looking for ratings or profits or a Trump presidency or else (charitably) so institutionally anxious about a second Trump term—after all, Trump has promised to start jailing journalists and shuttering private media outlets—that it fancies itself a kingmaker that can pick a better candidate than Democratic voters did, took a different route: conspiracy theory.

It was a surprising decision, given that major media has decided to turn the very real Trump-Russia scandal into a conspiracy-theory joke to avoid MAGA criticism; has turned the very real Trump-Ukraine scandal in a conspiracy-theory joke to avoid MAGA criticism; has turned the very real Trump collusion with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel both before and during his presidency into a conspiracy-theory joke to avoid MAGA criticism, and in short has consistently misreported Trump scandals as mere left-wing conspiracy theories to avoid suffering unkind words from MAGAs.

The conspiracy theory American media adopted post-debate, which dovetailed with what MAGAs have been saying for years now—meaning, it had nothing to do with the debate—and which perhaps major media thought gave it a chance to please MAGA for a change, was this: Joe Biden is a Manchurian candidate controlled by the Obamas or his aides; he doesn’t know who he is or where he is or anything his administration has done, a debilitating medical condition that somehow takes a hard left turn into sharp-as-a-tack mental acuity on one issue alone (masterminding a massive plot to persecute Donald Trump through the American criminal justice system), as a career criminal’s criminal trials couldn’t possibly be the result of his lifetime of criming; and the media must now regain its lost credibility with MAGA—a group it never had any credibility with—by admitting that it should have been covering President Biden’s now-evident dementia more aggressively. The problem? There was actually nothing to report on.

Are there nonpartisan historians who agree with this media-and-MAGA conspiracy theory? No. Are there government officials—people who work with Joe Biden daily—who agree with it? No. Are there any constituents (think of all the Americans who meet in private and in public with the President of the United States) who’ve emerged from such meetings to declare, “My God! He’s a vegetable! He’s someone’s puppet!” No—not one. On the other hand, a man known to have told at least 30,573 lies when he was president, who’s a 34-times-over felon facing 54 more felonies, says it’s true, so…

The point here is that the vanishingly small percentage of Americans who watched the Atlanta debate, and then the large percentage of that vanishingly small percentage who turned off the debate after ten minutes, have now been told by several groups of people whose job it is to create drama in America for (variously) ratings and profits and political gain that in fact Joe Biden might be non compos mentis. Never mind that this is belied by his recent State of the Union, which received universal praise; never mind that it’s belied by his recent rallies in North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin; never mind that it was belied (to a moderate degree) by his ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos post-debate, and then (to an ecstatic degree) by his ad hoc call-in to the television program of former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough days later; the narrative that Joe Biden might be in a massive cognitive decline never observed by his own physician or anyone who works with him (ignore the headline at this second link and read the actual report) exactly as a world-beating pathological liar has been telling us for years in order to defeat Mr. Biden at the polls (in 2020) and stay out of jail (in 2024) was just too good a ratings boost to turn down.

All this said, we are where we are. Major media is powerful; it can make us believe many an irrational thing, and with ease. It can make us elevate ten bad minutes in a debate over everything else we’ve seen from Joe Biden before and since. And what we’ve seen is an old man who looks and acts and speaks his age, who is the stutter- and gaffe-machine he’s always been and for those reasons a weak debater and even a less-than-inspiring public speaker. He’s also the man America elected by a 7-million-vote margin despite already having this information. And he’s been a great president, who’s assembled a great team around him—which team has produced great results.

None of this keeps us from being swayed by 24-7-365 coverage of a conspiracy theory.

So the question becomes, if Donald Trump and Joe Biden are going to be the 2024 nominees—and they will be, that’s now clear—how do we move beyond major-media noise and conspiracy theories and political rhetoric and anxieties that fly in the face of facts (remember, everyone was so surprised by Atlanta because we all agree that we didn’t see it coming based on the president’s conduct over the preceding fifty years) to make a determination of the relative cognitive fitness of the candidates?

Obviously we could just look at President Biden’s full cognitive work-up from this spring, which puts him in perfect cognitive health, and then compare that with the fact that Donald Trump has been lying about and doctoring and hiding his medical records for decades—ever since he dodged the draft in the 1960s by hiding his true physical condition—but why do things the easy way?

Comparing Trump and Biden on the Basis of Cognitive Performance

One way to start picking a President of the United States is to listen to our national security briefers for a change.

Indeed, as this report goes to press Trump amnesia is affecting more than 150 million Americans—or at least it must be, as it seems few remember the tsunami of major-media reporting between 2017 and 2021 about how incompetent Trump was at his job—so now is as good a time as any, and maybe even the best time ever, to take a stroll down memory lane. If we’re going to have the rare opportunity, in 2024, to choose between two men who have both been president of the United States, it allows us to look at things that really discernibly certifiably did happen while both men were at the Resolute Desk.

Not everyone wants to talk about the effect of politicians’ cognitive health on national security, however.

Some folks will tell you to compare President Biden’s and Mr. Trump’s endorsements, instead—as almost none of the members of the Trump administration, these being the people who knew him best and saw him in action as president, are supporting him now, while every Biden administration official backs the president and has explicitly rejected the far-right conspiracy theories about his mental acuity—while others will be a bit more wonky about it and ask you to compare job numbers, bills passed, innocent Americans falsely goaded into believing vaccines are harmful, and so on.

But now that the question of the cognitive abilities of each candidate is squarely on the table, and especially now that this question is being directed approximately fifty times to and about President Joe Biden for every one time it is directed to or about ex-president Donald Trump, Proof offers a very modest proposal: let’s try listening to the men and women who briefed then-President Trump between 2017 and 2021, and the men and women who are briefing President Biden now. For surely, if you’re going to throw out the window how each man has performed as President of the United States—which most Americans and almost everyone in U.S. major media appears ready to do—what must these journalists and voters be wondering about, instead? One imagines they want an answer to the following question: which of these men may be counted on in a crisis?

One presumes that Americans are thinking of crises when they harp on the cognitive abilities of two nearly-equally-old men because in non-emergency situations any sitting president might face one of two things is true: (1) the decision is actually going to made by someone the president hired (as the bulk of being president is simply hiring good people and delegating authority to them, not doing everything yourself), or (2) the decision is going to be made over a series of hours or days, with input from so many men and women and with so much time for the president to deliberate that a president would have to be authentically non compos mentis to fail (and anyone who’s read a transcript of the Atlanta debate, or saw the Stephanopoulos-Biden interview, or saw President Biden’s clear and rousing rally speeches in North Carolina or Georgia or Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania post-debate, at most worries that President Biden sometimes briefly loses his train of thought or stumbles over words, not that he has impaired memory, subpar critical thinking skills or limited power of discernment).

So let’s agree that the debate over the 2024 candidates’ cognitive abilities not only ignores the accomplishments of the two men, not only ignores the fact that most of the work of government is done by those a president hires and not by the president himself, and not only ignores the fact that cognitive impairment can as easily manifest as malignant narcissistic sociopathy with a pathological liar-and-Napoleon Complex co-morbidity as a lifelong stutterer increasingly stumbling over his words, but also focuses our attention almost exclusively on the moments in a presidency that almost never—but could!—arise: national emergencies. And who’s in the best position to give us a sense of the cognitive abilities of Mssrs. Biden and Trump in emergency settings?

Briefers.

The government officials who brief presidents immediately before, during, and after national emergencies. Their input is invaluable here. So what do such persons tell us?

Well, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, they all pretty uniformly sang the same tune. And it was a persistently, unremittingly, harrowingly upsetting one for anyone who cares about U.S. national security and thinks Trump might win this fall.

Cognitive Analysis: Donald Trump

What we know about Donald Trump’s handling of national security is disqualifying of his presidential candidacy. It would be disqualifying even if his opponent were a head of lettuce or a wooden beam in a horse stable rather than the 14th-ranked President of the United States. From leaking classified Israeli intelligence to two Russian spies in the Oval Office—which he knew was wrong, because he ejected all American media and aides from the room before doing it—to refusing demands by the Secret Service that he use secure phones and often using others’ phones to hide his conversations, from stealing classified documents and orchestrating an eldritch conspiracy to hide it to being “unusually secretive” about his five long private meetings with a former FSB agent, one constant in the Trump White House was that Donald Trump either didn’t understand the concept of national security, didn’t care about national security, or for reasons still unknown was actively working to undermine American national security.

Any of these three would of course disqualify him from being president again, though only the first would indicate cognitive impairment.

What we can do, then, is consider what we know about his national security briefings to determine his mental acuity. Again, we’re not focused on the evidence that he aims to harm America—for instance, he infamously withheld from his mid-campaign national security briefers in August 2016 that the Russians had reached out to his team so that law enforcement would stay in the dark about Trump-Russia collusion; his son Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian spy Maria Butina during the campaign and then later with other Kremlin agents, all of which Trump personally worked to cover up; post-election, he openly stated that he trusted Russian intel services more than American intel services; he held private meetings with Putin at which he either forbade an American translation or destroyed any such translation post-meeting—and focus instead on the bare facts of a typical Trump security briefing.

• As president, Donald Trump was so averse to reading that there were fears he might be borderline illiterate and in most instances no one was allowed to try to brief him through words that had been written down. There are too many reports on this to count, but start here, here, here, and here. His leading briefers “struggled” to deal with him daily and had only “limited” success getting him to understand anything they said to him. All of this has led to him being called only “semi-literate” in a national bestseller with top sources. He had to use cue cards to remind him to try to show empathy to shooting survivors but also struggled so badly to read cue cards while filming The Apprentice pre-presidency (Noel Casler, who worked for years on the show, says Trump “can’t read”) that he once shat himself in frustration over a three-syllable word.

• He could not be made to understand even the most basic concepts, leading his briefers to conclude that he had considerably substandard intelligence. There is a reason his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, called him a “moron.” Other aides have said far worse far more frequently. His Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis, compared Trump’s intelligence to that of a “fifth or sixth grader.” When a man who graduated from an Ivy League school, who is in his seventies, who claims to be a billionaire entrepreneur with international holdings—a man who, moreover, makes it a habit to speak publicly and often about how smart he is—can’t understand even the most watered-down presentations on matters of grave import, it’s understandable for briefers to conclude that the man is either a moron or experiencing a massive late-in-life cognitive decline. The sheer inability of then-President Trump to grasp even simple and basic concepts remains woefully underreported, and this is quite apart from his tendency—more a mental health issue than a cognitive one—to be unwilling to accept any fact inconvenient to him, leading him to (for example) lie hundreds of times to frightened Americans about the dangers of COVID-19. Many innocent citizens died due to these lies.

• Like a child, he could not sit still or focus. Briefings had to be brief—no pun intended—or the then-president would get antsy and eventually angry and just declare them over. His aides believed he had undiagnosed ADHD, which certainly becomes a major cognitive issue if, as with Trump, it has gone untreated for decades and decades. Going back to last century, to include interviews with biographers and aides and employers and potential business partners, Trump’s attention span has been measured in seconds at worst, mere minutes at best. A President of the United States simply cannot have such an attribute—as major emergencies often last hours or days or, in some cases, weeks. The intelligence community ultimately concluded that Trump was a “giant toddler” and had to be treated that way. How unsafe does that state of affairs make the United States when an emergency hits?

• He could not stay on topic. Not only would Trump’s attention immediately begin drifting at the start of the briefing, but in order to try to keep himself alert and in any way interested in the topic at hand he would simply change it to whatever he wished it would—which usually involved a topic that involved him in some way. He would turn a national security briefing into a discussion of real estate or his next political campaign, for instance. Even an hour-long briefing was only allowed by the former president to have eight or nine minutes of content, maximum.

• He had no patience for complex ideas, apparently because he could not process them. As indicated in many of the links already provided above, when briefing then-President Trump intelligence agents found that everything had to be boiled down to a “one-pager”—even if the materials the president actually needed to review were 15 or 50 or 100 pages. And to be clear, Trump would not read that one page; rather, he would demand that the content of the one-pager be turned into pictures he could glance at briefly. On the vanishingly rare occasions he could be impressed upon to read anything, it could not be in paragraphs; it had to be in bullet-points (but again, under a page). And in the White House, too, briefers found that Trump would become fussy and puerile the moment he got confused. And that was often, due to his subnormal comprehension skills and intelligence.

• He had no physical stamina. Major media reported over and over again from 2017 to 2021 that Trump worked at most (at most!) only three hours a day—sometimes there was no indication he’d done any work on a given day—despite being up for 18 to 21 hours daily because (in a revelation that should cause us grave concern about his mental acuity) he almost never sleeps. How does a man awake 20 hours a day manage to do work for only three of those? What does he do instead? Well, apparently he watches TV—and not PBS or the BBC, either, but news content that’s more like the sketchiest reality show you’ve ever heard of (think The Swan).

That Was Then… and This Is Now

All this was up to seven years ago—which is several lifetimes when you’re in your 70s as Trump is (he’d be approaching his 83rd birthday by the end of his term, if elected).

So how is Trump doing now? Well, fortunately we still have some key data points we can look at—all of which are startlingly revealing—though Trump’s no longer in office.

First, his criminal trial, which was easily the most important moment of his life. It wasn’t a national emergency, but it was a personal emergency—being alert and truly focused during his recent successful prosecution for committing 34 felonies in Manhattan could not have been more important to Donald Trump. So what did he do? He apparently slept and sometimes even sleep-farted through much of the big trial.

All right, but what about at rallies? Does he seem spry, sharp, and inexhaustible there?

Well, no.

First, people misunderstand how few events Donald Trump actually does. He usually does about two major events a month, and spends the rest of his time playing golf—which may seem like an active-lifestyle setpiece until you realize he never carries his own clubs, he drives a cart rather than walks, he will not step more than a few feet from his cart—to the point that he illegally drives on fairways and all sorts of places one is in fact supposed to walk on a golf course—and his swing is painful to watch because he clearly can’t even bring his arms all the way back to do a proper drive. No wonder he “plays” in a rigged “tournament” at one of his country clubs each year, giving himself a trophy even if he never swings a club. Trump was, indeed, once a decent golfer, but now he’s mainly an old man who enjoys driving a golf cart around.

As for his rallies, how are they not being covered for what they really are: endurance contests Mr. Trump is failing? I refer here not to Trump’s ability to stand—he’s able to hold himself upright, if in an oddly centaur-like stance, even if his “dance” moves are clearly those of a man with zero mobility, he increasingly sweats buckets (and even talks about doing so to try to diffuse the awkwardness of it), and sometimes has to be helped off-stage by young men in a way even the New York Times briefly acknowledged “raises health concerns”—or to his ability to read a teleprompter (as almost all of his rallies are simply him reading a script someone else wrote; Trump has demonstrated no ability to write beyond a sixth-grade level), but rather to what happens the moment the man goes “off-script.”

And what happens is bad. Very bad.

The first thing Trump does when he goes “off-script” is repeat lines and anecdotes he has trained himself to remember: a poem about a snake that becomes a very thinly disguised xenophobic rant in Trump’s bigoted telling; a transphobic anecdote about a teen weightlifter; several entirely fictional conversations he claims to have had with Big Man Who Cried, Soldier Who Called Him Sir, and My Friend Jim (who appears to be an imaginary friend); his bizarre “Straitjacket Mambo” dance; a lengthy diatribe about sharks I still do not understand and another one about windmills that I wish I did not, but do…

…in other words, crazy talk. Legitimately bizarre, deranged, silly, off-putting theater that unfortunately may be all too serious and indicate a deeply damaged cognition.

But the more important thing, as hinted at above, is that Trump repeats this material because he apparently can’t develop new material and is deeply concerned that he will forget the old stuff. This is a profoundly distressing sign of cognitive decline, and interestingly enough a practice we do not see from President Biden. Sure, the POTUS has some old chestnuts he used to like to wheel out because he thought they were crowd-pleasers (see “CornPop”), but of late when you see him working a crowd or speaking with reporters he often tells jokes you haven’t heard before, or offers up an original anecdote or memory, or makes observations on current events that are salient and smart.

Donald Trump does none of those things. A Trump rally is an hours-long affair that runs for hours almost exclusively because the star of it inexplicably shows up late—up to two hours late—spends an eternity getting to the stage, then has a speech written for him that’s far longer than it needs to be and some “unscripted” vamping that’s in fact just the same words in a slightly different order from the last time Trump greeted his audience with them. The vamping unfolds interminably—entirely non-organically—until people start leaving the venue while he’s still rambling on. The only physically or cognitively notable thing Trump does at rallies is wear a full (but ill-fitting) suit in extreme heat and somehow manage not to tip over despite having the most unusual stance in U.S. political history, one so bizarre it’s been linked to dementia by doctors. (We recently learned that Mr. Trump actually uses hidden “toe pads” to stay upright.)

But as this is an essay on briefers, let’s get back to that subject. Because while Trump doesn’t have conventional briefers anymore, he did work with briefers to prepare for the debate in Atlanta, and he does get regularly briefed on what media is saying about him. And the reality behind both those briefing endeavors is absolutely harrowing.

Americans were told that Trump spent weeks preparing for the Atlanta debate with briefers who knew the topics they were briefing the former president on inside and out. And how much of what Trump was told made it into his presentation in Atlanta

Almost none of it. Indeed, one could be excused for thinking that Trump hadn’t been briefed by anyone prior to the biggest debate of his life—the one he was hoping would help keep him out of prison—because in his forty-plus minutes of speaking in Atlanta he offered almost no facts or figures, no indication that he’s up on any current events, and no sign that he was even listening to anything his opponent was saying despite the fact that his opponent is the sitting President of the United States and has access to all the latest data on what’s happening in the world. In fact, to watch the Atlanta debate was to suspect that Trump and his team had lied about him receiving briefings at all; more likely, it seems now, is that because Mr. Trump has even less patience for information-processing of any kind as a private citizen than he had as president, he told his team to represent that he was preparing for the debate when in actually he was and is incapable of being educated on any subject or preparing for any event (an explanation for his sad regurgitation of old material at almost every one of his rallies).

Trump doesn’t currently receive candidate national security briefings because it has been determined by the federal government that he’s in the midst of waging an active insurrection against the United States and therefore can’t be entrusted with them. (Indeed, one of the last such briefings he had came on January 6, 2021, when the U.S. Secret Service told him that many in the mob he was speaking to at the White House Ellipse were armed with weapons, which Trump said didn’t matter because they had not come to the nation’s capital to kill him—leaving unsaid who precisely he did think they planned to kill.)

Trump likely gets occasional briefings from his aides and consultants on matters of political import, but there’s no indication at all that he remembers anything he’s told or even cares to listen to it. For instance, there’s no analyst anywhere who believes Donald Trump can end the Russia-Ukraine War in the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day, but this hasn’t stopped Trump—who knows very little about that part of the world, or any part of the world—from repeatedly insisting in public fora that he knows better than all his briefers on that topic.

In fact, supercuts abound of Trump delusionally claiming to be an expert on virtually all topics: at best a form of mental derangement, at worst a near-apocalyptic form of deflection that suggests that not only does Trump not know anything about anything but is aware of his ignorance and considers spectacular lies his only means to hide it.

The Atlanta Debate Rule

What we haven’t yet considered are all the workaday signs of cognitive decline that are new in Donald Trump, and therefore must now be subject to wall-to-wall media coverage.

Under the Atlanta Debate Rule established by Trump, MAGA Republicans, and major media, any signs of physical or cognitive ailment a presidential candidate evinces that aren’t new—so, Trump’s pathological deceit, delusion hyperbole, and barely contained rage, and, to be fair, Biden’s stuttering, occasional midsentence changes of tack, and persistent colds and/or post-nasal drip (both of which can cause hoarseness of voice)—not only can be ignored but must be ignored.

Conversely, the Atlanta Debate Rule requires, as noted above, that any new warning signs must be discussed and debated ad nauseam.

So what’s new, for Donald Trump, in his post-presidency years? Well, quite a bit:

1. Repeatedly losing his train of thought in mid-speech.

2. Long, rambling, incoherent monologues.

3. Sleeping through public events.

4. Confusing Joe Biden and Barack Obama over and over.

5. Confusing 9/11 and 7-11.

6. Confusing Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley.

7. Claiming to be the first person to realize that “U.S.” looks like the word “us.”

8. Forgetting the name of his doctor (Ronny Jackson).

9. Not knowing where he is.

10. Desperately trying to explain his cognitive decline as “sarcastic interpositions.”

11. Not knowing that World War II already happened.

12. Slurring his words.

These are just twelve items of a list of fifty or more that could be easily generated.

As Joe Scarborough notes in the first clip above in this section, Trump is even now “glitching out” during teleprompter speeches—the very sort of speeches he and his allies say President Biden can’t be credited with delivering beautifully because it’s impossible to do otherwise. Unfortunately, Trump himself gives the lie to that claim.

The point is that there’s a massive body of literature and videography that carefully chronicles new evidence of cognitive decline from Donald Trump, and it has by and large—if not entirely—been ignored by major media over the last year, which makes a sudden major-media interest in ten minutes of a debate that shocked it because it had no obvious evidentiary precursor appear not just unusual but cryptically motivated.

The Truth About Biden, As Begrudgingly Admitted By Media Outlets That Want to Destroy Him

None of the foregoing obviates the need to monitor how the two oldest presidential candidates in history are performing on a day-to-day basis, or for that matter to keep monitoring CNN’s descent into becoming one of the least admired media networks ever to broadcast in the United States. If the story of CNN giving up on journalism to fall into conspiracy theories—Trump’s laughably deranged Manchurian Candidate lie—is worth coverage, so too is how Biden has been faring since Atlanta (wonderfully) and how his opponent has been (impossible to say, as Trump has been avoiding all appearances and declined to be interviewed by ABC about his own cognitive state).

And if Americans are going to be concerned about the cognitive abilities of candidates—which they must be—they should also be able to explain what most concerns them, how they decide when to express those concerns, whither those concerns take them (does Joe Biden being a stutterer mean we deserve to fall into fascism under Trump?) and, most particularly, why those concerns are getting applied to only one of the two candidates.

Consider: one of the two candidates has been hiding, lying about, and doctoring his medical records for years. One of the candidates had such a bad case of COVID-19—a disease that infamously causes neurological damage—that he nearly had to be put on a life-saving ventilator. One of the candidates, unlike the other, hid all White House visitor logs for the entirety of his presidency, making it impossible to know if cardiologists or neurologists or medical specialists of any kind were treating the president. One of the candidates took a mystery emergency trip to a military hospital that he thereafter lied to American voters about ruthlessly. One of the candidates makes all his doctors sign illegal NDAs. One of the candidates once sent thugs to his doctor’s office to illegally steal medical reports. One of the candidates—the one who can’t remember his doctor’s name—received glowing, cataclysmically improbable reports from that same doctor as that doctor was running an illegal pill dispensary out of the White House, which acts this candidate refused to investigate as president (maybe because, as a man with a very long history of prescription drug misuse, he was benefitting from them personally) and then ensured after the “doctor” left the White House that he would be elected to Congress and therefore so in debt to his former patient that he’d never disclose how he’d lied for him. One of these candidates has on multiple occasions slurred his words in public speeches in ways that caused major-media journalists to speculate that he either was having a stroke or had been secretly wearing dentures for years. One of the candidates has been diagnosed as a malignant narcissistic sociopath by too many doctors to count, with the doctors using the DSM definition of this malady and hundreds of hours of Trump public conduct to diagnose him. One of these men is a pathological liar—a deeply disturbing cognitive condition.

In none of thesse cases is the candidate or man in question Joe Biden. It’s all Trump.

So what about Joe Biden? Atlanta aside, what evidence do we have of private decline?

And the answer is: not much.

The Truth About Atlanta

Consider the most damning assessment of Joe Biden’s cognitive state ever written, which was published by the New York Times just a week ago. Though framed to be as politically damaging to the president as possible, the report begins by conceding that “Like many people his age, [the president] has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time” (emphasis supplied). This early caveat almost swallows the whole report, as it concedes the president’s gaffes are normal for “people his age” and, just as importantly, that they are not new (as he has “long experienced” them, which means they were known to voters when they voted for him over Trump by an astonishing 7 million votes).

So given this caveat, what exactly was the big Times exposé?

Apparently, it’s simply that these normal, not-new signs of the standard aging process have “seemed” (notice the lack of certainty in the Times verbiage) to be “growing more frequent.” Putting the conditional aside, what does “more frequent” mean here? From once a month to once a week? From once a week to once every three days? How long are these lapses? Given that they’ve lasted only seconds in the past, but the Times now says they’re “more pronounced”, does this mean they’re 15 seconds rather than five? Twenty rather than ten? The Times answers none of these questions—and given how sensationalistic its reporting on this subject is, we can assume that if it had unusually troubling answers to offer to its readers on these matters, it would gladly offer them.

And what has been the actual effect of these occasional, wholly standard 81-year-old moments? Apparently nothing—as the Times has nothing to say that subject, either.

But the Times’ sensationalizing gets worse as its allegedly damning report continues.

If you read the whole piece—most people won’t, and will only read the headline—you learn that the purported increase in these longstanding and unsurprising moments is almost entirely attributable to moments when Joe Biden is “in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule.”

This is another way of saying that (a) the president’s staff needs to better his manage his schedule, which is true (in various ways and for various reasons) for almost every politician, and (b) he needs to do less large-crowd work—a policy he should already have adopted as a sitting POTUS. Large-crowd work is for those politicians trying to introduce themselves to the masses for the first time; Joe Biden has been a public figure for a half-century, has always billed himself as more of a policy wonk than a celebrity, and has never been particularly good in ad hoc situations because he ends up saying things he regrets. If the scoop from the New York Times is that he needs more sleep and less retail politics after 50 years in politics, that’s not a scoop—it’s a snooze.

But it gets worse.

If you keep reading further than the Times believes any of its readers will read—so, just a few paragraphs in—you find the Times conceding that in the days before the Atlanta debate Biden attempted to maintain a schedule whose “grueling pace…exhausted even much younger aides.” That’s right: Biden’s error was trying to work too hard for the American people, not some native, long-hidden cognitive decline. And he was working so hard even much younger aides struggled to keep up with him.

Incredibly, the same outlet that has been at pains to imply that the Biden team’s statements about the president suffering from a prolonged post-European trip jet lag were “spin” is now quietly admitting they were true: “Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned [Atlanta] debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Delaware before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals.” His staff also built in time for daily naps, because it knew that the president had pushed himself in Europe in a way that was a “grueling pace” even for his “much younger aides.” In other words, the man was in fact jet-lagged, and jet-lagged in a way even his younger aides were clearly feeling. So how did the Times not only fail to admit this in its earliest post-debate coverage, but actually work as hard as it could to undermine relevant facts that it knew to be true?

More humorously—but also infuriatingly—the Times works into its coverage of what bad shape Joe Biden is allegedly in the fact that he “exercis[es]” not just occasionally but “each day”, and that while his daily pre-Atlanta debate prep didn’t start until 11 in the morning (which for days the Times tried to imply was when Biden wakes up daily), that was only because he’d started “working well before” 11 every day and couldn’t get away for debate prep until that time.

Most fascinating—and again infuriating—is that in a report that’s headlined “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome”, all of the said lapses (not some of them, but all of them) are revealed to hail from June 2024, in other words during the period of grueling travel the Times admits was too much even for perfectly fit Biden staffers. So it turns out that the words “increasingly common” were code for “increasingly common because their cause is known, recent, and understandable.”

It was also, as importantly, and as the Times ultimately admits, transient. That period in Joe Biden’s schedule is over now, and he’s bounced back accordingly. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the Times, in a piece—remember—that appears to have been at least in part intended to end Biden’s presidency:

In the days since the debate debacle, aides and others who encountered him, including foreign officials, described him as being in good shape—alert, coherent and capable, engaged in complicated and important discussions and managing volatile crises. They cited example after example in cases where critical national security issues were on the line.

Aides present in the Situation Room the night that Iran hurled a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel portrayed a president in commanding form, lecturing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone to avoid a retaliatory escalation that would have inflamed the Middle East. “Let me be crystal clear,” Mr. Biden said. “If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.”

Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks. “You do this,” Mr. Biden said forcefully, “and I’m out.”

Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response.

So it turns out… there’s no story here. Which you wouldn’t know—quite conveniently for the Times drawing in readers, and quite inconveniently for the truth of the matter—from the report’s headline.

But maybe there are older, unreported concerns the Times has uncovered? Nope.

[Sources] have said the president is in excellent shape and that his debate performance, while disappointing, was an aberration. Kevin C. O’Connor, the White House physician, said as recently as February that despite minor ailments like sleep apnea and peripheral neuropathy in his feet, the president was “fit for duty.” He said tests had turned up “no findings which would be consistent with” Parkinson’s disease.

…

Aides to Mr. Biden responded to questions for this story by asking several senior advisers to describe their interactions with Mr. Biden.

“He’s inquisitive. Focused. He remembers. He’s sharp”, said Neera Tanden, the president’s domestic policy adviser. In briefings, she said, “he will ask you a tough question and he will say, ‘How does this relate to an average person?’ And if you haven’t thought of that in that time, you have to come back to him.”

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the president’s homeland security adviser, recounted a June 17 terrorism briefing for Mr. Biden in the Situation Room in which he “digested an immense amount of information” and asked questions that were “probing and insightful.”

She acknowledged that Mr. Biden’s debate performance had been different. “It doesn’t reflect the experience I have with him on a daily basis”, she said.

So, in summary:

1. Just 120 days ago, Joe Biden had a full cognitive work-up which showed no abnormal results. Major media had access to this report beginning on March 1 and pretended it did not.

2. Prior to leaving for a long overseas trip in June, President Biden exhibited no cognitive behavior that is unusual for his age. Major media had confirmed this within hours or (at most) days of the Atlanta debate, and either failed to report it, buried it in longer articles intended to suggest something very different about the President of the United States, or else—sadly, this is what happened with most media outlets—continued to report the opposite of the truth to mislead readers.

3. During his trip overseas, President Biden was so committed to working hard for America that he ignored staffers’ advice about resting, undertook a schedule that major media now confirms would be deemed both physically and mentally “grueling” for a man half his age, and yet still exercised daily and came home to America to continue to work long hours. This wholly elective lack of necessary self-care, which to his credit Joe Biden has only blamed himself for since Atlanta, led to him (a) getting a bad cold, (b) needing to take daily afternoon naps, and (c) making several more gaffes than usual in the days immediately preceding Atlanta. His transient ill health was known to his team before the debate, but there was also, it now appears, a universal presumption—almost surely correct—that if it had tried to move the debate or to pre-but any poor performance with a revelation that the president was briefly in a bout of bad health very much of his own making, major media would have skewered him mercilessly. So Team Biden rolled the dice.

4. None of this impacted anything national security-related, either before or after the debate, according to over a dozen sources. In other words, the fear Americans are most likely to have about the cognitive abilities of any U.S. president or candidate for that job are unfounded—as least as to Joe Biden. As to Donald Trump, as we saw above, the fears are very much founded, and have nothing to do with a known cause like an overseas trip during which the man ignored staffers and worked far too hard and too long for a man of any age.

5. Since he got over his cold and got some rest, Joe Biden has been just fine. And that is according to everyone who works with him who’s spoken to major media about it. Moreover, major media has confirmed from countless sources that prior to going overseas in June the president was sharp as a tack, including and perhaps especially in national security briefings and national emergencies—making claims of a longstanding cover-up by MAGA voters and far-right ideologues laughable.

6. In contrast, Donald Trump has been in demonstrated cognitive decline over the last year, and there is no known explanation for it; indeed, the campaign has not even tried to explain it. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Trump and his team, in conjunction with major media, have worked to treat any discussion of this subject as verboten, even though it’s been all over independent media outlets—with video, audio, medical analyses, and more—for months if not more. At the time major media began harping on President Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, progressive dissatisfaction with the lack of coverage of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline had reached a fever pitch. The only way for major media to resolve the situation in its favor was to turn a one-night situation whose causes and implications it quickly understood to be (respectively) transient and virtually non-existent into a bigger story that would at once plump ratings, virtue-signal even-handedness, and put progressive critics back on their heels. It also would punish an administration major media feels angst toward because it’s been far worse for ratings and for subscription models than its incompetent, corrupt, unprofessional predecessor.

Yet incredibly, the major-media deception continues.

As this Proof report went to publication, Katy Tur of MSNBC interviewed an NBC News journalist who is on-scene at the NATO summit, and the journalist told Tur that every single world leader he had spoken to said that they feared Biden “couldn’t do it anymore.” Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Except that as the report went on, it became clear that that rhetorical headline was wildly misleading, even outright false. To wit:

1. Under questioning, the respondent admitted that no world leaders had any concern about President Biden’s past governance or cognitive abilities.

2. Under questioning, the respondent admitted that no world leaders had any concern about President Biden’s current governance or cognitive abilities.

3. Under questioning, the respondent admitted that no world leaders had any concern about President Biden’s future governance or cognitive abilities.

4. In fact, it turned out that “he can’t do it” referred simply to whether President Biden had the physical stamina to campaign this summer. But the journalist then pulled back on even this modest claim, admitting that actually world leaders were only worried about whether President Biden has the same degree of stamina for campaigning that he had four years ago. In other words, they were aware that the man aged four years. That’s it. That was the big news coming out the NATO summit.

The problem with even this minuscule, insignificant revelation about the fact that time moves in a forward direction is that it ignores that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are now four years older; that both men are clearly showing their age physically; that the former hardly needs to have the physical vigor he did when he beat Trump by 7 million votes in 2020 in order to beat him again in 2024; that Trump is also not at all the candidate he was in 2020, as he now has 34 felony convictions, a court ruling declaring him a rapist, half a billion dollars in civil fines for multiple jury findings of Fraud and Sexual Assault and Defamation, a wife won’t speak to or support him and a daughter and son-in-law who won’t advise him anymore, a leaked plan for a vile Christofascist autocracy that is scaring the pants off most Americans, and 54 still-pending felonies in three state and federal jurisdictions.

Meanwhile Joe Biden also isn’t the candidate he was four years ago, as he now has four years of impressive presidential accomplishments to run on. In other words, if world leaders think Joe Biden’s body is four years older in 2024 than it was in 2020, and that he therefore needs to start listening to his staffers on the subject of taking better care of himself, they’re right. And if world leaders are feeling shock that America is now such a divided nation that even with all his baggage Donald Trump still manages to be in a tie with Joe Biden in the largest election model America has (see below), they can join the club—all of us here in America are dispirited by this fact as well.

But if anyone, in NATO or here at home, has any compelling evidence that Biden’s sporadic issues in June were caused by anything but what the campaign attributes them to, they’re keeping it to themselves—because we’ve seen none of that evidence, for all the major-media innuendo attempting to fool us into thinking that we have.

And if there’s an explanation for why the question asked near-daily by George Conway on multiple social media platforms—why aren’t we talking about Donald Trump’s mental health?—has gone unanswered, Proof hasn’t seen it. Evidence of Trump’s decline isn’t just not explained by a transient exhaustion confirmed by dozens of sources, but in fact has never been contradicted at all because Trump won’t release medical records, won’t conduct interviews with any outlet that’s not already in the bag for him, won’t answer questions about his cognitive state, no longer gives pressers and in fact hardly even does events anymore besides one or two rallies a month and highly secretive fundraisers at which he promises to drop taxes on the ultra-rich even further.

And Trump is categorically denying that anyone has actually seen anything suggesting he’s in cognitive decline, even though we all have with our own eyes and ears. We’ve even seen his cringeworthy, after-the-fact excuses for his public unspooling(s), which excuses—surely some of the most bizarre ever offered by a presidential candidate—don’t have even one corroborating witness, let alone the two dozen or more who can attest to President Biden’s debate performance being the result of exactly what he said it was the result of.

Conclusion

Donald Trump particularly benefits from, and is particularly gleeful about, the recent attacks on Joe Biden because they provide precisely the sort of ironic comeuppance he most prefers: someone else suffering what he himself has suffered, and—even better—suffering it in his place, that is, at a time when he knows he should be in the hot seat.

In both 2016 and 2024, Trump faced the prospect of a convention challenge. In 2016, that potential challenge came from the disgruntled second-place candidate—Ted Cruz—and, more distantly, from relative moderates Gov. John Kasich (R-OH), the third-place finisher, and current Trump VP candidate, Marco “Little Marco” Rubio (R-FL).

In 2024, Trump faced a revolt on his right flank via the Black Jacket Revolution, an internal coup plot the candidate only avoided when it was leaked to his political stormtroopers in advance.

So what better way to soothe Trump’s ego over the continued rebelliousness inside a party he thinks himself the king of than to see the Democratic Party pestering a leader?

Just so, ever since Trump entered politics, he has faced questions about his mental health. Why does he lie so much? Why does he exaggerate so much? Why does he have almost no close friends? Was he abused by his racist dad? Was he abandoned emotionally by his mother? Why do so many of his own relatives distrust or even hate him? Did he physically abuse Don Jr. when Don was in college? Why does he talk about having sex with his daughter Ivanka so much? Why does he see a ten-year-old and immediately say—out loud!—that he hopes to date them in just a few short years? Why is he such a virulent bigot, homophobe, transphobe, and antisemite? Does he actually have any core political beliefs? Does he believe in God? If not, why does he work so hard to pretend he does—even to the point of posting AI-generated pictures of his six-fingered self praying because real pictures of him engaged in that activity do not exist? It’s been ten years, perhaps even four decades, of people deeming Trump to be halfway crazy for the simple reason that everything he does and says suggests he is.

So of course he revels in a man who’s been one of the best presidents in U.S. history now being seen, on no evidence, as having cognitive deficiencies. There is more evidence that Donald Trump is illiterate than that Joe Biden has cognitive deficiencies, so what a delicious irony that America thinks he’s literate but that Biden may be senile!

Just so, Trump has carefully devised, over the last year, a narrative about Joe Biden being old and out-of-shape that applies perfectly well to him—he is pale, morbidly obese, and essentially bald; he can’t carry his own golf clubs or walk a golf course or get down a wheelchair-accessible ramp without a soldier’s help—but which now is being applied to a man who has pictures of himself on a beach with his shirt off, uses a golf cart properly (and yes, did indeed have a golf handicap of 6.7 until recently), and has often been seen biking and hiking and doing other things Donald Trump does not do on the justification that (wait for it!) human beings have a finite stock of energy available to them in their lifetimes, and even taking the stairs saps it. (Yes, this is another indication of Trump having mental health issues, as he actually believes this—or at least says he does to avoid stairs and inappropriately drive a golf cart on fairways.)

To Donald Trump, public humiliation over a perceived weakness is a fate worse than death. Thus the cheap bronzer he slathers on daily. Thus the bizarre hair confection a team of experts recreates daily with follicular acrobatics and product applications that are something close to a military-industrial trade secret. Thus his taped-down, too-long-by-half red tie and poorly-tailored gut-hiding suits. Thus the creation of MAGA hats to hide his sweating and increasingly desperate hair configurations and his ever more implausibly neon-yellow hair dye. Thus the bizarrely New Age explanation for why he dislikes stairs or walking. Thus the Straitjacket Mambo, or the Hands Dance, or whatever you want to call the weird arms-only gyration Trump does on stage to mimic dancing and basic human normalcy. Remember that this is a man who rarely smiles, never laughs, hates pets, has no interest in his own children, cheats viciously at golf, cheats on every women who loves him and backstabs every friend… in short, a man who presents as a malignant narcissistic sociopath and career criminal who’d be unemployable and likely unhoused if not for a $400 million inheritance from his possibly KKK dad that he lies about to hide that he was born between third and home.

For all this, it’s not Trump whose cognitive health is now being covered—sure, he’s daily called a liar and a cheat and a fraud, but somehow it’s framed as simply being his way rather than conduct of the sort a sociopath engages in to obscure cognitive decline—but rather Biden, who on occasion sounds and looks bad on camera but who more or less is always on point when you read his event transcripts. Biden makes and then remembers lists of ideas in real time; he has fantastic recall for people and dates; he explain his accomplishments and his future plans in a way that (with rare exceptions) anyone can understand; and still the “cognition question” is one Joe Biden is saddled with and not Donald Trump.

What Donald Trump has right now is a front row seat for trials and tribulations that should be visited upon him sevenfold being visited upon his political rival, instead.

He’s about to be sentenced on 34 felonies and we’re discussing, rather than that, why Joe Biden dramatically lost his train of thought a single time in Atlanta. It’s madness.

What we don’t have an answer for is why this is happening. Part of it, surely, is that we are all experiencing valid anxiety over the prospective end of America—and for ten to fifteen minutes in Atlanta, that end seemed closer than ever to many of us. That sharp realization was legitimately traumatizing. We’re still processing that trauma, and as is normal under such circumstances we tend to latch onto byzantine, morally unjustified explications of what we’re experiencing rather than seeking the simplest explanation.

And the simplest explanation is this: Joe Biden had a bad night because he made bad choices in the days leading up to that night, choices he no longer makes and which in a sense it’s good he made when he did because now he knows not to make them again.

And the simplest explanation would continue on to point out that major media is seeing its worst audience figures ever, and it’s bleeding money, and it’s experiencing scandal after scandal over bad hires (of both executives and on-air talent) and is angry over Americans quickly dissolving faith in corporate journalism. It feels constantly showed up by independent journalists and social media voices, and is angry at Team Biden in particular because it hasn’t given media the free content Trump did (not by being transparent, as the Trump White House was anything but, but rather by being so exponentially more corrupt and incompetent than the Biden White House that free major-media material emanated from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue almost daily). It is so appalled by its low ratings in an election year that it has decided to not just credit but mollycoddle a few congressional backbenchers, disgruntled former D.C. insiders, and know-nothing donors spending money they didn’t earn with their wits on candidates they think will further enrich them. And major media did all this by stretching into a 14-day fiasco what should have been at best a half-day news story.

And if, in the bargain, turning a half-day news story into a 14-day fiasco should also provide major media cover for failing to properly report on a monstrous individual they’ve never gotten the hang of covering, what of it? It’s a welcome if unlooked-for fringe benefit.

But America deserves better than this.

---

Note: If you’d like to tip this author, via PayPal, beyond any Substack subscription you already have, you can do so in any amount via the button below. PayPal is fast, free, and 100% secure.

---

If you’re interested in reading more research and writing from Seth Abramson, you can check out his Top 25 History substack, Retro, by entering your email address in the space below: