CV NEWS FEED // A bombshell report published by the left-leaning New York Magazine alleges that “elite” supporters of President Joe Biden engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” to withhold the truth about his declining mental ability from the public.
“The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters,” wrote New York Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi in a piece that ran on the Fourth of July.
She recounted a scene from last Saturday, just days after Biden’s dismal Atlanta debate performance which caused several members of his own party to express concerns about his continued campaign.
Nuzzi wrote:
In a tent on the backyard patio of a private home in suburban New Jersey, the president was eye to eye with a small group of powerful Democrats and rich campaign donors, trying to reassure them that he was not about to drop dead or drop out of the presidential race.
The content of his speech would matter less than his perceived capacity to speak coherently at all, though much of what he would say would not be entirely decipherable. His words as always had a habit of sliding into a rhetorical pileup, an affliction that had worsened in the four years since he began running for president for the third time in 2020.
“[Biden] might begin a sentence loud and clear and then, midway through, sound as if he was trying to recite two or three lines all at once, his individual words and syllables dissolving into an incoherent gurgle,” Nuzzi reported.
Later in her piece, Nuzzi stated that throughout the year she repeatedly heard “the same concern” from “Democratic officials, activists, and donors” supporting Biden’s reelection campaign: “Could [Biden] really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?”
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“Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata,” Nuzzi noted, emphasizing their apparent intention to keep the president’s mental struggles a secret:
They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.
When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record).
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Nuzzi wrote that there had “emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump.”
She claimed that many elite left-wing operatives secretly agreed with right-wing activists: “There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.”
Nuzzi’s report received a range of reactions on X (formerly Twitter).
Christina Pushaw, a top aide to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, asked: “[W]ho has actually been running the country and why don’t journalists seem interested in reporting that information?”
Similarly, journalist Jordan Schachtel asked: “Why didnt [sic] your editors want this published in January, February, March, April, May, or June?”
Nuzzi responded to her critics on X: “I work on most of my stories for months.”
“This piece is about a conspiracy of silence that made people reluctant to talk,” she continued in reply to conservative radio host Erick Erickson, who asked a similar question to Schachtel’s.
“I’ve been chasing down what I heard since January,” Nuzzi added. “That’s how long reporting takes. Debate changed people’s calculations about how candid they would be, and even then not on the record.”
Commentator Charles C.W. Cooke noted on X that the conspiracy described by Nuzzi “extend[s] well beyond Joe Biden.”
The people who orchestrated it, he wrote, “include [Biden’s] most likely replacement—Kamala Harris.”
“It cannot be fixed just by swapping her in and moving on. There must be a political price to pay for all involved,” Cooke argued:
The press insists it didn’t know. If that’s the case, then the White House—including Kamala Harris—has successfully conspired to hide vital information from the media about the president. What does the media, which considers itself sacred and crucial, intend to do about that?
Readers with access to New York’s Intelligencer can find Nuzzi’s full piece here.
