Surprise, surprise.
Many of those who promised during 2023 and early 2024 that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” are now deeply concerned about President Trump’s mental acuity.
Those “We missed the story” mea culpas from a while back were never about contrition, or even real embarrassment. These people had no problem lying about Biden’s fitness — they just couldn’t get away with it any longer. So they changed strategy. They started laying the groundwork to pretend later they had “learned their lesson” so they could go hard after the current president over the same issue.
MS NOW’s Jonathan Capehart, for example, remarked recently that “We should be talking about [Trump’s] mental acuity.”
“Why are we not talking about his mental acuity when we, when we … more people should be talking about it in the way they were giving President Biden hell for walking with a stiff gait,” he said.
The final sentence gives the game away, describing Biden’s obvious mental and physical deterioration merely as “a stiff gait.” As anyone with eyeballs during that era can tell you, the problems went well beyond this. They were less “stiff gait” and more “he’s talking to dead people again.”
Biden was so badly out of it that federal prosecutors felt sorry for him and decided not to pursue him for crimes he admitted to on tape on the grounds that he was an “elderly man with a poor memory.” The problems were real, and they were obvious — despite efforts by people like Capehart, who hosted Biden for extra-chummy softball questions about his fitness for office, to fool you into thinking otherwise.
“Why I get so enraged by this is, why is [Trump] being given a pass?” Capehart demanded. “He’s President of the United States! No other president would be able to survive.”
It is a hollow commentary that downplays Biden’s evident senility while pushing hard to oversell Trump’s mostly longstanding peculiarities. And he does this after participating in a concerted effort to portray Biden as vibrant, cogent, and vigorous — all lies, of course. The simpler explanation is that Capehart cares about neither president’s health, nor does he care particularly for the truth.
Speaking of party collaborators, let us not forget Joe Scarborough, also of MS NOW, who remarked recently, “For a president who has always been erratic, as he turns 80, we are seeing some diminished capacities [as] with anybody who would turn 80.”
He added, “But that erraticism, we are seeing it exaggerated.”
For context, Scarborough was among those fighting to the last man in the last-ditch effort to save Biden’s reelection campaign.
In 2024, as Biden lurched toward an uncontested renomination, Scarborough famously declared: “[H]e’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he’s been around for 50 years. … Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And f— you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second.”
Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race four months later.
To be fair, Scarborough is not overselling Trump’s supposed dotage the way Capehart has been doing. He recently remarked that any suggestion that Trump “has dementia or is losing his mind or whatever” is ridiculous — which is true.
Then we have the Substack cohort of former newsmen, including John Harwood and Jim Acosta, both of whom have suggested recently that Trump’s body and brain are both spiraling.
“There’s no question … about his cognitive decline and whether he’s just a man in decline,” declared Acosta, who used to work for CNN. “I think that’s undoubtedly the case. I mean, if we’re not going to believe our own eyes and ears anymore.”
He added, “This is the stuff that they’re waving in everybody’s face about Joe Biden, and Joe Biden was not falling asleep all the time in front of the cameras the way Donald Trump is. I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing.”
Biden did most certainly fall asleep all the time.
Harwood, who used to work for CNBC, added “You’ve got the bruised hands, you’ve got the neck and got the face, one side of the face is sagging.”
“It’s a very dangerous moment,” said Acosta, “that I think we’re in the middle of right now.”
In 2024, at CNN, Acosta promoted the White House’s false claims that all the photos and videos of Biden’s decline were so-called “cheap fakes,” the work of dirty, nameless political operatives working through “right-wing media.”
“We’re hearing about, so-called cheap fakes,” Acosta said. “It’s playing out on right-wing media, Fox, New York Post, and so on. And all of this is to try to make the case that Biden is slipping. He’s confused and so on.”
As for Harwood, he was but one of many newsmen who threw a conniption fit after Special Counsel Robert Hur politely noted that Biden’s brains had turned into mashed potatoes. He was also impervious to evidence after an especially poor, rambling Biden press conference that had been called in February 2024, specifically to dispel concerns about the president’s mental fitness. Harwood declared: “Biden’s press conference showed the same thing his performance in office has shown for three years: He can do the job.”
Even after Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 2024 presidential debate, Harwood was one of the last to keep the faith, writing, “I do not consider Biden cognitively unfit for the presidency. He has been doing the job effectively for more than three years.”
Now is as good a time as any to remind you that even Jill Biden thought her husband was having a stroke during the debate.
Questions about Trump’s age and mental fitness are certainly fair game.
But not from these people. They’re liars, idiots, or both. Either way, their word means precisely diddly-squat. They surrendered all credibility on this issue during the Biden administration, back when they demanded that you doubt the evidence of your own eyes and ears.
You are better off doing what you did back then, tuning them out and trusting your own judgment.
A version of this article appeared originally in the Hill on Aug 31, 2026.
The press were all claiming that they were seeing subtle signs of Trump's deterioration in his previous term. So this term is not much different.
The problem that the Democrats had was that the VP couldn't step in. The current framing is that if Trump became as demented as Biden was that he would continue as President. But Vance is a viable substitute. So there's no dead end there. Either Trump is still functioning well enough (bad!) or he isn't, so Vance (also bad!). So I think for the people running the Trump-is-unwell playbook, there is no actual win. They're just doing it because they can't think of anything else to do, and because they have lots of practice doing it.
“Why are we not talking about his mental acuity when we, when we … more people should be talking about it in the way they were giving President Biden hell for walking with a stiff gait,” he said.
So can we all just agree that Capehart is a brainless hack, a political operative, and the single most dishonest "journalist" in the Protection Racket Media?
Well, if we ignore all the other brainless, dishonest, political hacks in the PRM. Maybe it's simply a tie for last place.