Fuck These People Forever!!!
No peace for Joe Biden or anyone who aided in hiding his declining health.
I spend a lot of time (too much time, in fact!) wondering why other people do the things they do. It’s stupid honestly, but hey, the central grief of the human experience aside from death is that we’ll never really understand the mind or heart of another. And yet, we try!
Unfortunately for me and my brain, this impulse extends to politicians, who largely act in self-interest, and from a place of varying degrees of malice and/or buffoonery. It’s usually not much deeper than that! Still, in the 10 months since Joe Biden and Donald Trump stepped on that fateful debate stage in Atlanta and engaged in 90 minutes of the most excruciating television I have ever seen in my life, I’ve spent too many hours wondering why Biden made the choices he’s made in the last few years.
In the immediate aftermath of that hell night, I was in good company. For weeks, the world collectively wondered what the fuck Biden was thinking and doing, tormented by the lingering trauma of the debate. (Jack said it best, “I will have Biden’s vacant, open-mouthed, thousand-yard stare into the void seared in my memory forever.”) You know the rest: the campaign began to unravel, and Biden waged a failed redemption tour before eventually dropping out. He receded as the 2024 election barreled ahead and then quietly handed over the keys to Trump 2.0.
I shouldn’t be thinking about Joe Biden anymore, but my curse remains. In fact, my bafflement and rage toward that man and those who shielded him has only grown exponentially since he settled into life as a former president.
This isn’t entirely the product of my obsessive brain. It’s also because people close to Biden absolutely cannot stop talking about what a flaming disaster this was and is, and how evident the president’s issues were for years. We’re not talking about a few scattered anonymous sources. It’s many prominent people, some of them on the record.
The parade of splashy incriminating testimonies began last month, and it has only accelerated since then, culminating in a thoroughly enraging New Yorker piece that dropped on Tuesday.
I’ll get to that in a bit, but first, let’s go back to April. That’s when reports started to emerge around the release of Chris Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. In it, Ron Klain—Biden’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2023—recounts the experience of prepping for the debate that would ultimately, and rightfully, doom the candidacy.
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