President Biden's onstage performance in Atlanta last Thursday offered fresh evidence of what many Americans have suspected for years now: The 81-year-old incumbent appears to be battling severe age-related cognitive decline.
In the wake of the debate, new reporting suggests that Biden's aides have taken great pains in recent months to shield the aging president from reporters, the public, and even White House residence staff. He is reportedly more engaged between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when aides are likely to schedule his public events. And while the president is known to make gaffes in his public appearances, "people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome," the New York Times reports. He is often surrounded by staffers on his walk to Marine One, and he now wears larger-soled sneakers in an apparent effort to prevent tripping. He holds far fewer press conferences than his recent predecessors and avoids sit-down interviews like the plague. And when the president does appear at public events, he almost always relies on a teleprompter.
"They were always gatekeeping him — not just him but [the first lady], too," Michael LaRosa, who previously served as a special assistant to the president and a spokesman to first lady Jill Biden, told National Review on Monday. "They're very aggressive in safeguarding their privacy and their access to him and limiting access to him. But I didn't think of it as anything to do with his age, to be honest."
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time White House staff have worked to conceal the evidence of a president's infirmity from the American public: Throughout U.S. history, when the commander in chief has become physically or mentally diminished, those around him — family members, advisers, and staff — have employed a variety of tactics to protect the administration from the resulting fallout by keeping voters in the dark.
"Grover Cleveland was probably the most egregious, because he had an actual cancer operation in 1893, on a yacht, of all things — a moving operation that was completely concealed from the press, and where he lost much of his upper jaw," says Jerald Podair, a professor of history and American studies at Lawrence University. "There was an actual report on that operation, and it was just deny, deny, deny, from the White House. The rest of the press colluded with the White House and kept it secret . . .
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