It’s a familiar theme: the tragic hero who gains power to vanquish some evil and in doing so commits, or becomes, the evil he intended to vanquish. The Huey Long-like character of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” comes to mind, as does the figure of Brutus in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”
And so, increasingly, does President Biden. The man elected to banish his self-deluded, deceptive, disrespected and destructive predecessor increasingly embodies those vices himself.
So much is becoming clear in recent reporting about the president’s mental state. “Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head,” Olivia Nuzzi reported last week for New York magazine. “The first lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say ‘hello’ to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him.”
There’s plenty more like this, including in The Wall Street Journal and The Times. “Asked if one could imagine putting Mr. Biden into the same room with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia today, a former U.S. official” — who had helped prepare Biden for a recent trip to Europe — “went silent for a while, then said, ‘I just don’t know,’” The Times reported. “A former senior European official answered the same question by saying flatly, ‘No.’”
We have gone from Howard Baker’s famous question about Richard Nixon — “What did the president know and when did he know it?” — to something much more pathetic: What does the president know and does he even remember it?
All this would be more sympathy-inducing if the president and his advisers weren’t engaged in what, to all outward appearances, looks to be an aggressive cover-up about the speed and extent of his decline. A phalanx of administration officials constantly insists that the president is sharp, spry, on top of it, slowed by age but well oiled with wisdom. The president himself declared “my memory is fine” in an angry rebuttal in February to the report of Robert Hur, the special counsel, which described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
