How Lies About Biden's Health Led to Trump's Victory

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

14 May 2025

President Biden and President Obama during a campaign fundraiser at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles in 2024. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images.

The same corporate media talking heads who told us to ignore Biden’s failing health are now cashing in with books that may reveal political cover ups but that also cover up their own role in facilitating corruption and inevitably a defeat.

In 2020, this columnist and many other people observed that Joe Biden was not a healthy man. His confusion and his strange and angry outbursts, such as telling a voter who questioned his position on the second amendment that he was, “Full of shit,” are now legendary. Robert Hur, appointed special counsel investigating whether Biden had improperly held classified materials, not only described Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” but gave examples of troubling lapses for a man who was president and expected to run for office again.

“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

But in 2020 and again in 2024 before his calamitous debate with Donald Trump, the Biden team assured the public that he only had a stutter. Despite the fact that his decades in public service never indicated the presence of a speech impediment, the public were reassured that if they thought they noticed anything else, they should not believe their lying eyes. Corporate media amplified the narrative and ridiculed anyone who attempted to counter it.

Now some of those same individuals who denounced anyone who raised questions about Biden’s health are writing articles and books revealing what they previously tried to hide. Jake Tapper of CNN argued on the air with Lara Trump when she noted Biden’s cognitive decline. Tapper accused Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law of mocking what he called Biden’s stutter and added she had “no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”

Now Tapper has co-authored a book which focuses on the decline he said others were not qualified to discuss. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again is also a cover up by Tapper, who was assisted by others in corporate media who supported Biden’s re-election and who had an incentive to downplay what the public observed despite their efforts.

Joe Biden’s problems didn’t start in 2024. They began with the process rigged by the Democratic Party establishment in 2020 and the oligarchs who gave them their marching orders. But Biden’s candidacy presented problems for the democrats. He was always a right winger, who made sure that Clinton’s Crime Bill put Black people in jail and that student loan debt could not be discharged in bankruptcy. Given that he would sometimes speak of a “racial jungle” and other very problematic language, it is perhaps understandable that his behavior in later years didn’t seem to be very different from what had been observed about him previously. As for representing the right wing of the party, his role there made him attractive as a running mate for Barack Obama in 2008. Obama needed a white conservative counterweight to his false but well orchestrated image as a progressive. In 2020 they had the conservative democrat they wanted and they succeeded in getting him elected.

Biden managed to win in 2020, but the behind the scenes maneuvering needed for a re-election in 2024 was too much for him or for corrupt operatives, including Obama, to handle. The dishonest way in which he became president couldn’t work a second time, considering that he lied about being “the most progressive president since FDR.” Instead he lived up to his promise to the party’s rich donors. "We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it's all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change."

Therein lay a problem for voters, who did want fundamental change. They didn’t get the Build Back Better legislation they were promised or the continuation of covid pandemic era programs such as a child tax credit and increased eligibility for medicaid and SNAP benefits. Instead they saw a faltering man, sometimes literally, who would only commit himself to arming Ukraine and Israel and breaking a railroad workers’ strike.

No one was willing, as the saying goes, to tell grandpa he had to turn over his car keys. They hoped lightning would strike twice and that Biden, with all his weaknesses, could be re-elected. When they should have had a primary to give voters a choice, they instead chose to cover up what could not stay hidden. While democrats were subverting the desire for change, Donald Trump emerged from the republican primaries as the nominee and the clear favorite of his party’s members.

Now we are being told that in fact Obama had to lead Biden off the stage after a fundraiser in Los Angeles when previously we were warned about “deep fake” videos showing a confused president wandering off as if he were a toddler. Tapper and others are cashing in on democrats’ angst after living through another Trump victory. But the apologists are playing another role too.

Real journalists would reveal the extent of oligarchic control of the U.S. political system. That control made the losing effort to keep a failing man afloat seem like the best choice. Opening up the process would mean the possibility of dealing with another Bernie Sanders, a milquetoast faux progressive, but still anathema to the wealthy donors who ultimately forced Biden to stand down.

The corporate media work with the democrats to ensure that the public’s choices remain limited to the favorites of the party establishment, who regardless of what else they claim, will maintain neo-liberalism at home and imperialism around the world. They are still playing that role of cleaning up for the party with these revelations which tell anyone who was paying attention what they already knew. The Tappers of the world can hide the truth or reveal it, but they remain on the gravy train. Rich donors have been picking the nominees and putting their thumbs on the scale of the process for decades. Sometimes they win and sometimes, as in the 2024 election, their machinations blow up in their faces.

The incompetence driven by corrupt wheeling and dealing didn’t end with kicking Biden out, but continued with Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Obama and Nancy Pelosi did not want Biden to endorse Harris. But congressman James Clyburn wanted Biden to endorse her and Harris pressed the case for herself. Biden endorsed her, an unenthusiastic Obama took five days to do so, and she went on to be a $1 billion loser in November.

The illusion of democracy in the United States is a very dangerous one. Millions of people are told that their votes matter, but in reality the decisions are made long before they cast a ballot. The story of the 2024 election did not end the way the Democratic Party wing of the duopoly wanted. Some of their methods may change but top-down decision making will not change.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at [email protected].