Stop Smearing Biden’s Mental Capacity

Jonathan Bernstein: “One of the many ugly things that’s happened during Joe Biden’s presidency: The smear that he’s lost it — that he’s cognitively impaired. It’s a frequent explicit refrain within Republican-aligned media, and quite a few Republican politicians, Trump included, have repeated it. I don’t know quite how common the belief in it is among Republican voters, but judging from my reader mail, many of them treat it as simply a well-known fact that the U.S. president is barely able to function.”

“As bad as smearing the mental capacity of political opponents is — and I do think this is the worst I’ve ever seen it — it’s not new, and it’s not a case where only Republicans are guilty. Many Democrats thought Trump, another aging politician, had serious cognitive deficits, just as they had believed Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were stupid. Republicans believed that President Barack Obama was so stupid that he was incapable of functioning without a teleprompter (despite the obvious fact that Obama was constantly seen in public giving perfectly cogent statements without one).”