When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he hardly left his basement. As then-President Donald Trump crisscrossed the country in those final months of the campaign, Biden held tiny events in backyards with a couple of dozen socially distanced supporters, then called it a day.
The move worked. Hidin’ Biden was able to conceal his deteriorating mental acuity (and trust me, that’s real — I’ve covered Biden since the early 1990s, and he was sharp as a tack back then). Once in the White House, Biden has continued to hide — despite a pledge to “bring transparency and truth back to the government,” Biden has held the fewest press conferences since Ronald Reagan and just half as many as his predecessor.
But running again? Yes. Biden, 80, announced on Tuesday that he will seek re-election in 2024 — that means he’d be 86 years old at the end of his second term should he win.
One Republican presidential candidate thinks that’s tantamount to elder abuse — and claims that Biden isn’t really running the show, anyway.
“It’s a myth that Joe Biden is actually running for president. He’s not,” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday on Fox News. “It’s just the managerial class using Joe Biden as a front to advance its own agenda. To them Biden’s cognitive impairment isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.”
“This is how the managerial class crushes everyday citizens – not with a bang, but with a whimper,” he said.
Ramaswamy was harsh, calling Biden a “hollowed-out husk.”
“The administrative state more effectively controls its puppets when they are hollowed-out husks of themselves. The fact that it’s elder abuse is just a cost of doing business for Biden’s handlers. It’s revealing that the DNC [Democratic National Committee] refuses to host primary debates this year; they’re spitting in the face of their grassroots base.”
Ramaswamy is right: The Washington Post reported Thursday that “the national Democratic Party has said it will support Biden’s reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates,” even though there are already two announced challengers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson.
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Perhaps Biden will disappear again in Campaign 2024. He has as president. Biden averaged just ten news conferences per year during his first two years in office, including 11 solo sessions and nine with foreign leaders, according to The New York Times, which cited the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In contrast, former President Donald Trump averaged 19.5 during his first two years in office, while Barack Obama averaged 23 and Bill Clinton averaged 41.5.
Meanwhile, an NBC News poll found 70% of Americans, including 51% of Democrats, think Biden shouldn’t run for re-election, with just 26% supporting the president.
Nearly half of those surveyed (48%) cited Biden’s age as their “major” concern with Biden running again. Another 21% said Biden’s age was a “minor” concern.
And don’t forget: Should Biden not make it through his second term, we’d all be stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.