Former NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd offered the ridiculous excuse for the media and the White House staff for not recognizing that Joe Biden had a few loose bricks in his chimney. If TV viewers were able to recognize it in short video clips, how could people who saw him every day miss it? Todd insists that White House staff did not cover up his mental decline on purpose?
Todd, on “Matt Lewis Can’t Lose,” cited Chris Whipple’s new book, “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House” and agreed with the premise that cabinet members and staffers did not hide Biden’s lost acuity, they merely never noticed it. I may have n on Tuesday, but it wasn’t last Tuesday. I now qfuestion Todd’s mental acuity. He said he believed Biden’s aides were unaware of his decline due to “benign ignorance” and “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Todd said:
“You know how you read something and you’re like, that feels more accurate than anything I’ve heard? [What] Whipple says is: look, there was no Parkinson’s diagnosis that was covered up, right? This is not — people want to [ask], ‘Is it a cover-up?’ And the answer was: it’s not necessarily a cover-up. What it was, was sort of benign ignorance. In that, everybody could claim, ‘Well, my interactions with him — he’s still the same guy,’ right?”
“And a combination of that and Trump’s behavior made them not see how damaging Biden might be to the public. Because they were comparing it — well, hey, yeah, we’ve got the forgetful guy, but Trump, right? There was always this ‘but Trump.’ And the way Whipple seems to characterize it is that it was discounted because of the Trump discount, right? Essentially, right?”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL“If you’re 80 years old and you’re standing next to an 80-year-old, you think you look pretty good in the mirror. You’re 80 years old and you’re standing next to a 50-year-old and you suddenly go, ‘Who’s the old guy standing next to the 50-year-old,’ right? And that, I think, contributed to the benign ignorance on this story.”
“Yes, everybody could see that Biden was slowing down, but it didn’t seem like a threat because the candidate on the other side was Donald Trump. And this is where a version of Trump Derangement Syndrome may have impacted the clear thinking of Biden’s behavior and potential performance.”
“The only thing I can chalk it up to is this, whatever you want to call it, this fear that some members of the media had sometimes — that they would be perceived as helping Trump if they somehow diminished Biden. Right? That it was some sort of zero-sum game. And I think this has been the fundamental mistake that many members of the traditional press have done.”
