I don’t get angry often when reading the news, but the coverage of Biden’s age over the last few days has made me feel a deep rage I haven’t felt in a long while. The nature of the coverage has been profoundly stupid and, I think, actively harmful to American democracy. Time for the airing of grievances.
The current media firestorm was set off by the release of DOJ prosecutor Robert Hur’s conclusions on his investigation into Joe Biden. So let’s begin by reminding ourselves about the circumstances of that investigation.
Donald Trump has been indicted in four different jurisdictions for crimes that range from the abundantly silly to the deeply serious. For my money, the most important of the charges against Trump are being brought in DC and Georgia and concern Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. But for better or worse (it’s for worse), Republicans have given Trump a pass on that, since they’ve bought into the absurd tale that it was Biden who was trying to steal the election. The most potentially damaging charges against Trump are those that he’s defending in Florida, regarding his retention of classified documents. I’ve seen interviews with Trump supporters where, although they are still all-in for Trump, they admit that the documents case isn’t great.
Trump is, by nature, a counter-puncher. If anyone accuses him of doing something, he accuses his accuser of doing the same thing. Then he claims that everyone does the thing that he’s been accused of, and if anyone’s trying to hold him to account, that’s just him being unjustly singled out. He does this all of the time. So when he got in deep trouble for illegally retaining classified documents, his response was “Joe Biden illegally retained classified documents, too, and they’re not prosecuting him! The system is rigged!”
Now Biden did have classified documents in his possession. This kind of thing happens a lot. There are a lot of classified documents flying around the halls of power, and if you’re in those halls of power and you’re not careful, you might inadvertently remove some of them from where they’re supposed to be. But no one is ever prosecuted just for that. If it’s an innocent mistake, and that innocent mistake is pointed out, and you return the documents promptly, then you’re in the clear. No harm, no foul. And that’s what Biden did: he promptly returned the documents when they were discovered.
In Trump’s case, it might have been an innocent mistake when he removed the documents in the first place. But he held onto them tenaciously, even knowing they were classified, and waved them around in front of random people in order to make himself look important. That’s a crime. So there is a substantive, ethically and legally relevant difference between what Trump did and what Biden did.
But Trump complained that he was being singled out. And so AG Garland, in his wisdom, decided to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Biden to show that no one is above the law. Trump complained that Garland would just appoint a Democratic hack to clear Biden, so Garland appointed a partisan Republican prosecutor, Robert Hur. (Why do I say he was a partisan Republican? Read on.) Hur investigated Biden for a year, and just released his findings.
What Hur found was that Biden had not committed any crimes. That finding was, however, misleadingly presented. On the first page of the report, Hur alleges that there is evidence that Biden committed a crime. It is only on the sixth page of the report that we find that there are innocent explanations for that evidence, and no reason to doubt those innocent explanations. So a more accurate summary would be “we have no real evidence that Biden committed any crime.” That’s not how Hur summarized his findings, though.
Before going any further, what I just laid out is a news story, and an important one. Trump was in trouble, he tried to extricate himself politically by accusing Biden, a Republican prosecutor investigated the charges against Biden, and, ultimately, Biden was exonerated. That’s front page news. But that’s not the story the big media outlets ran with.
The actual story we got comes from a smear that Hur inserted into the report. In addition to the fact that there’s no real evidence that Biden committed any crimes, Hur said, they were unlikely to obtain a conviction if the case went to trial because Biden would have presented himself to the jury as an old man with a bad memory, and the jury would have bought that and not convicted. In support of this theory, Hur presented several cases where Biden suffered memory lapses during their interviews. And that was the big news story: Biden suffers memory lapses because he’s old.
This is pretty remarkable. The only reason that Biden’s memory made it into the report at all was in the context of Hur speculating about the defense that Biden would have offered at trial. But that speculation is crazy. Hur’s report itself says that there’s an innocent explanation for Biden having classified documents in his possession! I guarantee that that would have been Biden’s defense at trial, had it gone to trial! Why the fuck would Hur think that Biden would play the “I’m too senile to have committed a crime” card at trial? The obvious answer is that he didn’t think that Biden would have defended himself that way, but he wanted an excuse to talk about how old Biden is and how bad his memory is in the report. That’s why I called him a partisan. Biden’s memory is, at best, tangentially relevant to what Hur had been asked to investigate. But that’s what he highlighed in his report. Hack.
And the media, instead of leading with the genuine news story, decided to write hundreds of stories about Biden’s memory problems, amplifying the smear and ignoring the substance in the report. Hacks. I expect it from Fox News. Shame on the New York Times for following along.
“BUT!” I hear the complaint. “Didn’t Biden have memory lapses? That’s in the report! Are you accusing Hur of lying?” I’m not. I do suspect there’s some exaggeration in there. For instance, Hur says that Biden forgot when he was vice president. I’d be willing to bet that this was in a context where Hur was asking Biden about some other chain of events and asked “And were you vice president at that time?” and Biden said “I don’t recall.” Or something like that. I guarantee that it wasn’t like Hur asking “When were you vice president, Mr. Biden?” and Biden shouting “1937!” and shitting his pants, which is how I see conservatives portraying it on social media. So some of those stories of memory lapses are probably inflated. We’d need to see the transcripts to know exactly how those incidents went down, and we haven’t.
“But surely some of those stories of memory lapses are accurate and not exaggerated. I mean, Biden is old. It would be remarkable if nothing slipped at any point during the interview, right?” Yes, this a fair point. Biden is really old. Did he suffer from memory lapses due to age during his interviews with Hur? I wasn’t there, but sure, I bet he did.
“And isn’t that newsworthy? Don’t the American people have a right to know that Biden is losing a step?” And here’s where the rage starts to bubble up. Because the simplest answer to that question is an emphatic “NO!”
There are two important points to remember here. The first is that literally every person in America knows that Joe Biden is super old. This has been discussed, endlessly, for the last four years. “Joe Biden is a very old man, and sometimes he misspeaks, often because of how old he is” is not news to anyone. This is not the first time Biden has showed his age. It is the ten thousandth time Biden has showed his age. “Biden has another senior moment” is not Page 1 news. That’s not to say that it has no news value at all. Sure, report it. But Page 1 is that Biden was exonerated of bullshit criminal allegations that were only thrown at him to create a smokescreen for Trump’s serious crimes. Page 10 is that a partisan Republican is sharing stories of a couple times Biden forgot things.
The second important point is that Donald Trump is super old, too, and also has obvious mental problems. If you look, you can find plenty of cases of Biden getting a name or a date wrong. (Which, to be clear, is not great! It would be way better if the Democrats weren’t nominating an octogenarian!) But you can find just as many cases of Trump speaking at a rally where his speaking turns into incoherent mumbling word salad. Take this gem from a recent rally in New Hampshire:
“We have become a drug-infested, crime-ridden nation, which is incapable of solving even the 'solllest'... smallest problem. The simplest of problems we can no longer solve. We can't do anything. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.
He can’t remember people’s names:
And remember when he repeatedly said that Nikki Haley was in charge of security on January 6?
Trump still has a kind of manic energy, whereas Biden is usually more mumbly and whispery. Biden looks older than Trump, for sure. But if the worry is that once cognitive decline starts, it can accelerate rapidly and unexpectedly, that’s just as much a reason to worry about Trump as it is Biden.
None of this is to say that Biden’s mental state isn’t worrying. It is. My complaint is about the nature of news coverage and priorities. If the people making editorial decisions at the New York Times think that it’s very important that everyone know about Biden’s mental lapses, and so they run both front-page news stories about each new incident accompanied with huge amounts of commentary about those lapses from pundits and concerned Democrats, then it’s equally important that everyone know about Trump’s mental lapses, and so they should run both front-page news stories about each new incident accompanied with huge amounts of commentary about those lapses from pundits and concerned Republicans. But they don’t.
You might worry that I’m cherrypicking with my examples of Trump’s lapses. Sure, he messes up names sometimes. But who doesn’t? Well, Biden’s messing up the names of the leaders of Egypt and Mexico was front page news last week. It was taken as evidence of further decline. Trump doesn’t get the same treatment.
It comes down to a matter of narratives. The story with Biden is that he’s old. So events that fit that story get solid play. The story with Trump is that he’s evil. So events that fit that story get solid play. This sets up a choice for November: The old guy or the evil guy? And that’s an obvious choice: you pick the old guy. But there are plenty of people out there who don’t think that Trump is that evil, and that the guardrails of American democracy can protect us from a second Trump term as they did a first term, and who are really worried that Biden is losing it. They’ll be tempted to vote for Trump this year. And the news media is giving them permission to do so.
To be clear, the news media shouldn’t be in the business of preventing people from voting for Trump if that’s what they want to do. Just the facts! But they should be making it absolutely clear - because these are the facts! - that the choice is not between someone who is old and someone who is evil. It’s a choice between someone who is old and someone who is both old and evil. That means giving equal time to “Trump is old” and “Biden is old” stories. To do anything else is to actively mislead the American public about the nature of the choice they will face in November.
This is worse than Hilary Clinton’s emails. Many liberals complain about how the New York Times treated Clinton’s emails, and they’re complaining that the Times is doing the same thing to Biden now. That’s wrong. This is worse. Hilary probably was guilty of a crime, she just did a good job burning the evidence. So you shouldn’t criticize the Times for covering the emails on the grounds that there was nothing there. And it doesn’t make sense to criticize the Times for making Hilary’s emails seem like just as big a deal as Trump’s manifest unfitness for office. Hilary was also (arguably) manifestly unfit for office, and the email scandal was indicative of why: she abused the public trust. And whether or not someone is unfit for office is a value judgment anyway. In 2016, Trump was well-known to be the incarnation of personal vice, and Hilary was well-known to be a career politico who viewed power as her personal right. Which was worse? That was for voters to decide. It was a case of “What do you think is worse? These flaws or those flaws?” And so it makes no sense to criticize the Times for treating the two sets of flaws as being potentially on par.
But in the case of Biden’s age, the flaw is equally shared by Trump and Biden. They’re both old, and they’re both showing it. Equal flaws requires equal coverage.
With other things, coverage can be unequal. Trump is demonstrably worse with his personal corruption and disregard for Democratic institutions. But Biden is arguably worse on the border than Trump. And inflation was pretty bad, and Biden probably shares some of the blame for that, even though the inflation has since been tamed. So there are places where the Times can honestly and critically cover Biden. But on the topic of age, the Times is simply following the narrative and not making an effort to inform their citizens in a way that is relevant for the decision they’ll have to make in November.
That’s why I’m so angry with the latest news cycle. It’s not just that we’ve seen front page stories about Biden’s age for the last four days when we don’t see anything similar for Trump’s age-related gaffes. It’s that we’re seeing those stories at the prompting of a partisan smear inserted into a DOJ report. And that report contained an incredibly important story that was very good for Biden, but which was ignored.
No wonder Biden’s behind in the polls.