It’s worth reading the whole article because there’s many amazing quotes. But the best part comes at the end:
In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She (Jill Biden looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …
I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.
I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.
Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.
This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.
For many inclined to support the president, this was good enough. They did not need to monitor the president’s public appearances, because under his leadership the country had returned to the kind of normal state in which members of a First World democratic society had the privilege to forget about the president for hours or days or even weeks at a time. Trump required constant observation. What did he just do? What would he do next? Oh God, what was he doing right at that moment? Biden could be trusted to perform the duties of his office out of sight. Many people were content to look away.
My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.
“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.
We’re sooooooo fucked lmao
That quoted passage has the cadence of lovecraft rofl
“As I walked down the ancient hallways, guided by the increasingly loud wailing, or… was it all in my mind?, I started to sweat from the heat, but I still felt a chill. I had felt this before! It was the aura of DEATH seeping from the walls, the pocked carpet, the blinking lighting fixtures. Blinking… had they always been blinking? How long had I been walking this short hallway? My God… it should’ve been minutes, yet when I started, the paint on the walls had appeared fresh, in line with expectations of the home of a top world leader. I glanced a few feet from me and saw a portrait of a man with… a skull, stripped of human flesh. Blink. The President. Blink. The skull… smiling at me? Blink. I reached my clammy hand out to the nearest wall and to my shock it chipped, the paint fell right off, and my hand crumbled the wall into dust! I instinctively pulled back, but something had changed, the foundations were gone! The hallway, the White House itself, was slanted. I slid into and immediately broke through the wall which covered my face and my vision in white and then blackness. I could feel myself falling by the churning of my stomach. Falling, falling, falling forward and downward forever into the depths that lay below the White House… the previous wailing replaced by my own. The last image in my mind was the skull. The smiling President.”
I want every article from now on to be written like a horror story around Joe Biden
A dark secret that LITERALLY EVERYBODY ON THE LEFT KNEW ABOUT AND WAS SHOUTED DOWN OVER BY LIBERALS. Fuck I was saying he was sundowning in 2020
Liberals are very good at picking up the facts 5-20 years after whatever terrible thing has already happened and can’t be avoided. It’s one of their strongest powers
This passage describes how he was in 2019-2020
A campaign trail is a grueling exercise for anybody of any age, from the youngest network embeds to the oldest would-be presidents, and back then, there were days when Biden appeared sharper than on others. I knew it was a good day when he saw me and winked. On such occasions, he joked and prayed and cried with voters. He stayed to take a photo with every supporter. He might even entertain a question or two from the press. He had color in his face. There was no question he was alive and present. On bad days, which were unpredictable but reliably occurred during a challenging news cycle, he was less animated. He stared off. He did not make eye contact. He would trip over his words, even if they were programmed in a teleprompter. On such occasions, he was hurried out of the venue quickly and ushered into a waiting SUV.
Did they think his condition would improve?
I feel like its more like the network of advisers around a late stage Hapsburg or Pharaoh, their power (and jobs) are predicated on the legal entity of Biden being President regardless of the actual state of Biden’s form. They don’t actually need him to do anything other than occupy that legal space
This is elder abuse lmao
I’m okay with a little elder abuse, so long as the victim is someone who spent his adult life making life hell for the working class.
His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey.
This is just the normal human reaction to seeing someone physically and mentally incapable being pressured to perform. Even though I have no problem with trying and hanging every Nazi regardless of age, it’s just sad to see an old man who cannot even comprehend the weight of his actions or even remember what he did 3 minutes ago. At this age and capacity, you just make sure he has a decent remaining of life if he’s your nice grandpa, or quickly shoot him if he’s a fascist war criminal.
In some ways I think it’s what makes working with dementia patients the easiest, as long as you don’t know what kind of person they were beforehand, you just sorta see the disease more than them which makes it easier when they go off the rails and start screaming at you. What I wouldn’t give to see Biden get worked up on the debate stage, walk over to Trump and start hitting him because all of a sudden he forgot where he was and this man is yelling at him, extra points if he grabs a finger and bends it backwards, a favorite of confused old ladies in the hospital.
I don’t genuinely feel bad for Genocide Joe but seeing that old man with dementia triggers my brain’s empathy response since I’ve worked with lots of patients who had it and my own grandmother had it as well. But then he has so much blood on his hands and I despise him. It’s a weird feeling. Honestly, it’s such a horror show seeing them prop up this rotting corpse. It makes me nauseous.
My reasoning is that he’s unable to consent to this. I have strong feelings on things done without consent, so I see this as a shithead who’s brain is so liquified he can’t actually even hold those shithead opinions anymore. He’s a bad person, and in a just world he’d have been punished for his crimes, but right now I simply can’t be sure he’s even fully aware anymore. At some point he ceased to be the person he was and became a replica of himself. A thin fascade over a rotten interior, scheduled for demolition.
He’s gone mentally and he’s being paraded around by his “loved ones” in a horrifying attempt to hold onto power. His moments of lucidity must be terrifying beyond anything I’ve ever experienced and hopefully will ever experience. I just can’t find joy in his family continuing to piss on his still (mostly)ambulatory corpse.
Quick edit: Though, I’m not saying no one else can or that people are bad to if they do. Feelings can be complex.
I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered.
I guess evil don’t recognize evil cause butcher biden is a lot of things, and a decent man free of sin ain’t one of them.
His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals.
