After Biden's Out of Office, Public Learns of More Decline

Debra Saunders on May 23, 2025

WASHINGTON -- Almost everything the Democrats and big media told the country about the vaunted character of former President Joe Biden is collapsing.

Biden framed his run for the White House in 2020 as "a fight for the soul of the nation." A smitten chattering class was all on board.

In October 2020, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, "Joe Biden is the personification of decency, and if he wins he'll do his best to restore our standards of behavior."

In 2025, it's hard to see anything decent about Biden clinging to power, even as his mental faculties faded.

Gray Lady columnist Jennifer Senior in 2020 wrote a column on then-President Donald Trump headlined, "The President Has Made Selfishness Our National Credo." Who looks selfish now?

Following the release of the book "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, comes the news that Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones.

According to Team Biden, the former president's last screening for prostate cancer occurred in 2014.

"I think these people who really suspended their lives to work on the 2024 campaign for an extended period of time, really want to know when he was diagnosed, what he knew and how responsible former President Biden was being with his health," The New York Times' Lisa Lerer noted on Tuesday's The Daily podcast.

Biden also avoided cognitive testing during his term in office.

His pet phrase, "on my word as a Biden," has become a national joke.

When Biden declared his candidacy in 2019, he talked about being a "bridge" officeholder, which led his team and the press corps to believe that he was prepared to serve one term only. It now seems obvious that Biden's language was deliberately vague because he wasn't planning to walk away.

Even when he was tanking in the polls.

So, thank you, Nancy Pelosi.

The horrible personal tragedies Biden has had to endure -- the loss of a wife, a 13-month-old daughter and later an adult son -- warrant sympathy. But they do not excuse Biden's attempts to run for reelection without coming clean with voters about his apparent mental decline.

The irony here is that the left held up Biden as a paragon of virtue whose election would bring the political Age of Aquarius. They were so convinced the 45th president was not up to the job, while their side was laden with genius, that they didn't take a hard look under the hood of the 46th president.

Trump is president again, so the news media's focus is on Trump, as it should be. But this is also the season when books on the former president are airing new stories about his decline.

Or, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote of Trump shortly before the election, "Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America."

A president without shame, a party without spine, a media without integrity and a cancer in the bones of American institutions -- brought to you by the folks who said they would make it all go away.

Whatever made them think Joe Biden could deliver that?

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.

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