At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson won the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage. Which is fine. (I am generally against reporters giving each other prizes, but that’s a separate issue.) What’s important is what Thompson said in receiving the award:
“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.”
Yes to all of that.
First, I am now utterly convinced—based on conversations and reporting over the last few months—that Thompson is right to use the word “cover-up” when describing how President Biden’s inner circle treated his health, age and declining abilities.
The narrative that the Biden team tried to sell in the immediate aftermath of the president’s June debate performance was that he was just plain old sick. That he had a bad cold.
Of course, all of us have had a cold. Even a bad one. The reality is that you can power through it. You might not be your best self, but you definitely wouldn’t look and sound like Biden did.
Then the excuse became that his scheduler had screwed him. Biden had made two transatlantic trips in the two weeks prior to the debate—he was exhausted! Then it was that the makeup people had done Biden dirty. And then it was that some of his senior advisers hadn’t pushed him hard enough in debate prep.
The truth, we now know, is that the debate wasn’t the first time that Biden’s inner circle had seen him in bad shape. Seemingly lost. Clearly impaired.
And that is a scandal. Because it explains all of the efforts to keep Biden from giving media interviews and, largely, from appearing in public. While they publicly insisted that everything was totally fine with Biden—and that he was outworking even 20-something staffers—his team knew that this was, in a word, bulls–t.
Which brings me to the second thing I have come to believe about the Biden health cover-up: I do not think that the media was actively complicit. But that doesn’t mean we are blameless—or unbiased.
I have not seen proof that reporters knew—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that Biden was declining and ignored it. This was not, to my knowledge, a repeat of how the White House press corps treated John F. Kennedy, for example. Those reporters very clearly knew that JFK was cheating on his wife. They knew he was, at times in the White House, very ill. And they reported none of it. They agreed to shield the less-savory qualities of the president from the public.
There are those—on the Republican side of the aisle mainly—who say “JUST LOOK AT BIDEN, OF COURSE THEY KNEW!!!” To that, I would say that the bar for declaring that a sitting president is mentally declining is very high. As it should be. Most reporters aren’t doctors, and diagnosing a president from afar isn’t something we should be doing.
(I would note that the same holds true for Donald Trump. Lots of people on the left insist that the current president has dementia. Or is “crazy.” Or mentally incapacitated in some critical way.)
But this is not to let me—or the media more generally—off the hook on the Biden health story. Here’s why: The way that we all could have gotten more clarity on Biden’s condition was to push harder. Dig deeper. Not take the assertions from the White House that “everything is great!” at face value. Not allow ourselves—as I did—to be shamed by the Biden team into thinking that, by asking questions about the president’s health, I was some sort of ageist.
Because there is no question that Biden often didn’t pass the eye test. If you watched him move and speak, there was reason to suspect that he was struggling. And certainly cause to ask lots more questions. But the bulk of the media establishment was willing to take Bidenworld’s word for it—believing, I think, that surely a Democratic administration wouldn’t engage in a massive cover up of a president’s health.
I do not think that same benefit of the doubt would be given to a Republican president—especially not Donald Trump.
That is a problem. A big one. And Alex Thompson was right when he said on Saturday night that journalists “bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”
This Biden health episode wasn’t the start of distrust in the media—especially among Republicans. It has been brewing for a very long time. But it has provided jet fuel to that distrust.
Saying “sorry” isn’t easy to do in life. Because to genuinely be sorry is to admit you were wrong. You made a mistake.
But, to my mind, the only way we begin to restore trust in the media is to do just that. When we screw up, admit it. Explain why we did it—even if it makes us look bad. And then do everything we can to not make that same mistake again.
Want more ball and strike calling—no matter what uniform the batter at the plate is wearing? Check out Chris Cillizza’s Substack and YouTube channel.
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