The Washington Post has admitted that concerns about the US president’s health were valid.
The Washington Post editorial board believes that President Joe Biden should not have sought re-election, and that his staff is to blame for concealing his declining health until it became impossible to do so.
In a Tuesday editorial, the Post praised Biden’s “profoundly selfless decision” to withdraw from the race and allow Kamala Harris to take his place as the Democratic nominee.
“In retrospect, Mr Biden should not have sought reelection. The June 27 debate was worse than just a bad night, as the president maintained afterward. The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline,” the Post editors wrote.
They argue that the US would have been better off if Biden had withdrawn after the Democrats’ “surprisingly good showing” in the 2022 midterms. They claim that if he had stayed in the race, “a diminished Mr Biden, at the head of a dispirited party, would likely have lost in November.”
The Post believes that Biden “deserves recognition” for relinquishing power and giving a new generation of leaders a chance, “albeit via internal party machinations rather than the ballot box.”
The Post noted that Biden may have left the race, but he remains president until January. They claim that the Democrats’ platform still “promises a second Biden term,” mentioning him 287 times in their 92-page platform, while Harris is only mentioned 32 times.
Biden, the oldest person ever to be inaugurated as US president, faced accusations of senility and dementia during the 2020 campaign. His physical and cognitive decline while in office was dismissed by the White House staff and most of the mainstream media as remnants of a childhood stutter.
Even after the June 27 debate, Biden’s supporters continued to assert that he was “sharp as a tack.” Biden himself vowed that only God could make him quit. However, in mid-July, he was flown from Las Vegas to his Delaware home after contracting Covid-19.
At the end of that week, a letter was posted on his personal X (formerly Twitter) account announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race. In a subsequent post, the same account announced Harris as Biden’s replacement. Insider sources claim that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, was responsible for this turn of events.
“They staged a coup against the president of the United States,” former president and current Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, told Fox News in early August. “It’s like you’re in a fight with somebody, and you’re really winning, and they take him out and they put somebody else in,” he continued. “Nobody ever heard of this before. This is a coup.”