Looking back on 2024, Peggy Noonan has no doubt of the scandal of the year: "the decline of Joe Biden's mental acuity" and what she says was a coverup by White House staff. The Wall Street Journal columnist claims President Biden "has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn't fully up to the job." She suggests the right move would've been to inform the public. Instead, the Biden White House "felt justified in misleading the public about the president's true state," protecting him from scrutiny—until it couldn't. With the June presidential debate, "the country finally saw what those in the White House saw every day," Noonan writes, adding the alleged coverup will forever color the Biden administration's reputation.
She contrasts the White House's alleged actions with those of the wife and aides of Woodrow Wilson who "misled the public as to his condition" after the president was left incapacitated in 1919. In her 1939 memoir, Edith Bolling Wilson wrote that she suggested her husband should resign before a doctor told her that would be bad for the country and that she should essentially serve in his place until he recovered. She claimed to have acted as an intermediary and "I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs." However, in his 2013 biography of her husband, historian A. Scott Berg wrote that Bolling Wilson had "executed the physical and most of the mental duties of the office" and "enshrouded the Presidency in as much secrecy as possible."
"The Wilsons' historical reputation was never the same. Nor will the Bidens' be," writes Noonan, who suggests that to mislead the public about the president's true state is "Democratic Party gospel." Apart from the alleged coverups related to Democrats Biden and Wilson, Noonan refers to speculation that Ronald Reagan was experiencing cognitive decline shortly before he left office. "Political parties, like people, must beware the stories they tell themselves, the stories they weave and come to believe that just are not true," Noonan concludes. "The not-true ones can get you in terrible trouble, especially the ones you use to justify your actions and that make poor personal motives seem noble." Read the full piece here. (More President Biden stories.)
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