Ronny Lynn Jackson, who served as physician to the president in both the Obama and Trump administrations, expressed serious concerns on Tuesday about Joe Biden’s mental fitness to be president of the United States.
In a conference call set up by the Trump reelection campaign, Jackson said:
He’s not up to the job. I’ve watched Joe Biden on the campaign trail, and I’m concerned that he does not have the mental capacity, the cognitive ability, to serve as our commander-in-chief.
He routinely gets lost in the middle of a thought and can’t recalibrate….
I’m a physician … so I’ve seen a little bit about how the issues with cognitive ability, how they start.
I’m not making a medical assessment. I never took care of Vice President Biden. I’m not trying to remotely diagnose him with anything. I’m saying it as a concerned citizen.
We can all see … something’s going on here.
Jackson added:
I’m concerned, like so many other people in this country are right now, that he is not up for the job. Like I said before, this is a demanding job from a cognitive standpoint.
You have to stay locked on. You have to be articulate. You have to process lots and lots of information and multitask.
Right now he’s having a really extreme time just focusing [on] … the one task at hand when he stands up in front of voters and tries to explain something.
Jackson explained that when the former vice president becomes frustrated or angry, “that’s a mechanism that [people who] are having cognitive difficulties use to move on and to get out of a situation.”
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Biden provided evidence of his mental decline the day before. During an interview with Cincinnati’s WKRC-TV, the host asked the former vice president about a recent Gallup poll.
Host: Gallup reported last week [that] 56% of Americans said they are better off today than they were four years ago … under the Obama-Biden administration. So why should people who feel that they are better off today, under a Trump administration, vote for you?
Biden: Well, if they think that, they probably shouldn’t … their memory is not very good, quite frankly.
During a Columbus Day campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio, Biden mistakenly claimed that he was running for the Senate, and then quickly corrected himself:
I’m running as a proud Democrat for the Senate … when I ran as a proud Democrat for vice president, and I’m running as a proud Democrat for president.
That same day he appeared to forget Mitt Romney’s name: “I got in trouble when we were running against … that senator who was a Mormon … the governor.”
President Trump seized the opportunity Biden gave him, tweeting on Monday:
Sleepy Joe Biden had a particularly bad day today. He couldn’t remember the name of Mitt Romney, said again he was running for the U.S. Senate, and forgot what state he was in.
If I did any of this, it would be disqualifying. With him, he’s just Sleepy Joe.
Others close to Biden in the past have noticed his decline, including former White House stenographer Mike McCormick, who worked for the Obama-Biden administration from 2011 to 2017. Said McCormick: “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the same mental acuity as he did four years ago. He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking. He’s a different guy.”
In the past, said McCormick, if Biden stumbled, “He’d just make a big joke out of it.… He’s not doing that anymore. He read that [Democratic National Committee speech] verbatim.… It’s not Joe Biden anymore.”
Andrea Widburg of American Thinker noticed also his physical decline, and it surprised her: “No one can deny that the man is aging with incredible speed.” She referred to a photograph taken of Biden on Saturday while he was addressing the Plumbers Local Union in Erie, Pennsylvania. That photo, taken by Carolyn Kaster of AP, is available here.
Anecdotally, this writer will shortly turn 81 and is increasingly sensitive to how men age, especially when walking. He has noticed that Biden appears increasingly frail physically as he approaches a lectern to make a speech.
Surely the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi notices it as well. Perhaps that is why she has proposed a bill creating a committee to determine when a president’s day is done, to be replaced by his vice president. Most observers concluded she was talking about President Trump, but she made it abundantly clear that she was not necessarily referring to the current president. Was she referring to a potential Biden presidency that would likely have to be turned over to a Vice President Kamala Harris?
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