THE QUESTIONS: He almost seemed to be raising The Question!

THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2025

Quickly, his segment fizzled: Was something wrong with President Biden, even as he sat in the Oval Office?

Increasingly, it's widely assumed that the answer seems to be yes. Increasingly, it's widely assumed that the former president was already the victim of some type of cognitive decline—of something resembling some form of "dementia"—even as he sat in the White House and decided to seek re-election.

At this site, we're not like the rest of the kids! If someone has suffered a cognitive loss, we don't react with vast surprise when such people display limited cognitive powers. 

We don't rush to blame such people for their loss of cognitive power.  We regard it as a (familiar) human tragedy—as a tragic loss of human capability and potential.

That said, is it possible that something was wrong with President Biden? In early September 2023, David Ignatius may already have believed that the answer was yes when he wrote this surprising column in the Washington Post:

President Biden should not run again in 2024

Joe Biden launched his candidacy for president in 2019 with the words “we are in the battle for the soul of this nation.” He was right. And though it wasn’t obvious at first to many Democrats, he was the best person to wage that fight. He was a genial but also shrewd campaigner for the restoration of what legislators call “regular order.”

Since then, Biden has had a remarkable string of wins. He defeated President Donald Trump in the 2020 election; he led a Democratic rebuff of Trump’s acolytes in the 2022 midterms; his Justice Department has systematically prosecuted the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that Trump championed and, now, through special counsel Jack Smith, the department is bringing Trump himself to justice.

What I admire most about President Biden is that in a polarized nation, he has governed from the center out, as he promised in his victory speech. With an unexpectedly steady hand, he passed some of the most important domestic legislation in recent decades. In foreign policy, he managed the delicate balance of helping Ukraine fight Russia without getting America itself into a war. In sum, he has been a successful and effective president.

But I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement—which was stopping Trump. 

On September 12, 2023, so wrote David Ignatius. The last statement in that opening passage turned out to be prophetic.

Full disclosure!  Ignatius never referenced cognitive decline in the course of his surprising column.  He only mentioned President Biden's age, and the way his advanced age was being viewed by large swaths of the electorate.

Ignatius never mentioned cognition. We'll guess that may have been the place his column came from, but we have no way to be sure.

Was something wrong with President Biden? Was his judgment already limited? Is it possible that major decisions were now being made—or were being influenced to an irregular degree—by various people around him?

Yes, of course that's possible—and, despite Ignatius' words of praise, the judgments being made were often remarkably poor. We refer, for example, to the ludicrous conduct at the southern border, accompanied by the lack of any attempt to explain those border policies.

Beyond that, we refer to the ludicrous approach to widespread concerns about inflation and the cost of living, in which President Biden kept stressing the utterly silly practice of "shrinkflation"—the practice by which consumers get charged the same old price for a slightly smaller bag of cookies or (potato) chips.

That was a ridiculous way to push back against inflation concerns. Was it a product of limited cognitive power, insisted on by the victim of that tragic decline?

Early in the June 27 debate, President Biden's apparent decline could no longer be hidden or wished away. It's as we noted on Tuesday:

At the nine-minute mark of that debate, the president authored a halting, tumbling non-answer answer which ended up making so little sense that it was no longer possible to avoid an obvious possibility:

Something seemed to be wrong with President Biden! Major Democrats still tiptoed around the specific shape of the problem. But at that debate, with the whole world watching, the reality of this apparent affliction was suddenly there for everyone to see.

Is it true that something was wrong with President Biden? For ourselves, we would take it as obvious that the answer is yes. And while we're at it, let's say it again:

In any such circumstance, we of course regard that affliction as a terrible human tragedy—as a tragic loss of human potential, as a tragic loss of the ability to lead a fully productive life.

We regard any such affliction as a human tragedy. But any such affliction is an affliction nonetheless. 

Was something wrong with President Biden? Increasingly, it seems that the answer is yes. Within that context, along has come a woman from Maine who has voiced a related question:

Is it possible that something is wrong with the current sitting president? Is it possible that something is wrong with President Trump? 

So asked the island dweller in yesterday's New York Times. As we noted yesterday, her letter reads exactly like this, New York Times heading included:

Trump Is Crossing So Many Lines

To the Editor:

Re “Trump Gives Commencement Address at West Point” (news article, May 25):

President Joe Biden was excoriated for his embarrassing and revealing performance at the campaign debate last year. Where is the press reaction to President Trump’s embarrassing, inappropriate and at times unhinged performance at West Point on Saturday, complete with his disrespectful red cap?

It was a public moment that should raise alarms about his mental health and judgment, just as Mr. Biden’s debate disaster did.

J— K—
Arrowsic, Maine

The letter came from a very small town—from a very small town on an island. The writer is asking a set of good questions. Paraphrasing just a bit, her questions go like this:

Is it possible that something is wrong with President Trump? 

Also, and speaking a bit more generally:

 Where is the press corps' reaction to the endless bizarre behaviors of the current sitting president? What explains the lack of alarm about his peculiar behaviors?

In our view, this island dweller is making a set of perfectly valid points:

She says that President Biden's performance at that debate should have raised alarms about "his mental health and judgment." She also says that similar alarms should exist with respect to President Trump. 

She suggests that President Trump's "mental health and judgment" should be the source of widespread alarm. It seems to us that her assessment is basically right.

Is the letter writer right? In our view, the answer is yes. She refers to President Trump's speech at West Point last weekend. We would instead refer to an endless string of ludicrous statements made by this sitting president—absurdly inaccurate factual claims which undermine the American discourse "in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

He never stops making these ludicrous statements! Is something wrong with President Trump? We'd guess that the (tragic) answer is yes.

That said, the New York Times, and the rest of the American press, is never going to give direct voice to any such focused sense of alarm.  As with the fictional citizens of Camus' fictional Oran, the men and women of the American press simply aren't able to come to terms with that fairly obvious task. 

Neither are the men and women who pretend to function at the highest levels of this nation's academic establishment. In our view, no clearly stated sense of alarm has emerged from that province either.

Is something wrong with President Trump—with his "mental health?" Why won't anyone at the New York Times, or anywhere else, directly pose that question?

As in Oran, so too here today. The authority figures we're taught to respect simply aren't up to that challenge. They aren't smart enough to tackle that question, nor do they have the requisite courage.

Presumably, they all believe that something may be wrong with the president's "mental health," but they aren't going to say so! Consider what happened in the final segment of the MSNBC program, All In, this past Tuesday night.

So promising! Chris Hayes started that final, rather brief segment in the very place where we ourselves had started that morning's report. As you can see by clicking here, he started that segment like this:

HAYES (5/27/25): If we're going to have a conversation about the mental acuity of a recent president, it does seem a little weird to be focusing exclusively on the last one, and not to also include the one who blasted out this typically, truly insane, all-caps social media screed yesterday...

Already, the worms of conflation were infesting that formulation. Tomorrow, we'll be more specific.

At any rate, Hayes now began to read from a "typically insane" Truth Socia post by the current sitting president. In our own report that morning, we had started in that same place. 

The full text of the president's screed appeared on the screen as Hayes read the way it started:

HAYES (continuing directly): "Happy Memorial Day to all"—

OK. Weird way to start.

"—including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds, who allowed 21 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane, through an open border policy that only an incompetent president would approve."

And on and on and on, like an old man ranting at the sky. 

At that point, Hayes introduced the two guests who were supposedly going to help him discuss the point he was attempting to make. 

What exactly was that point? Hayes seemed to be saying that, even if something had been wrong with President Biden, something seems to be wrong with President Trump as well. He seemed to be echoing the lady from Maine—the woman who said that alarms should be raised within the press about the current president's "mental health and judgment."

We agree with the lady from Maine, and that start by Hayes may have seemed promising. But in the beginning was the end, and this apparent attempt at discussion fizzled out very fast.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Should the New York Times be devoting a series of article to that possibility? Should Hayes be devoting a series of segments to that woman's sense of alarm?

In our view, the answer is yes, but Hayes will never do that. Almost surely, his corporate owners won't allow it, and—not unlike the undisguised clowns who message on the Fox News Channel—he's being paid a very large (undisclosed) sum to color within the lines.

Why did this segment fizzle and die? Why will there be no follow-up?

In the beginning was the end! Hayes had laid the foundation of self-defeat right there in his opening statement. The short segment which ensued may have been a mildly pleasing sponge bath for viewers out in Blue America, but no real attempt was made to examine the question with which it started:

Something was wrong with President Biden? OK, but is it possible that something is wrong with the current sitting president?

In our view, the answer to that question seem to be (tragically) yes. That said, Hayes and his colleagues at MSNBC won't be articulating that possible point of alarm. Neither will the New York Times—and neither will our greatest academics.

Simply put, we humans aren't built for this line of work. Tomorrow, we'll journey back in time to show you what the greatest minds of the last century were thinking about, even as we first walked through the gates at Harvard College back in the mid-1960s.

Chris Hayes isn't going to explore that Maine woman's state of alarm. In fairness, neither will anyone else at Blue America's cable news channel.

Meanwhile, from the greatest minds at our great universities, the silence has been (almost) universal. The lady from Yale did give it a try. We all saw what happened to her.

Tomorow: The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument!