Now They Tell Us

Who has my ice-cream cone?

Now They Tell Us:

How Top Democrats Changed Their Tune on Biden's Decline After the Election

In a cruel twist of irony, Hillary Clinton may have been the only one

who wasn't lying

Andrew Stiles, The Free Beacon

Mainstream journalists spent the last four years "speaking truth to power" by helping Democrats lie to the American people about the extent of Joe Biden's cognitive decline. The truth can finally be told now that the election is over.

The first of several books about the Democratic Party's scandalous cover-up, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, came out earlier this month. Excerpts from the upcoming titles, such as Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple, have leaked to the press in an effort to juice sales. The revelations contained in these works of postelection journalism reveal the alarming disparity between what leading Democratic politicians and White House aides felt privately about Biden's cognitive health (very concerned) and their public comments defending the president from criticism.

Ron Klain

After serving as White House chief of staff from 2021-2023, Klain returned in 2024 to help Biden prepare for the now infamous CNN debate. Klain was "startled" by the president's condition during their first meeting, Whipple writes in Uncharted. "He'd never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool." Klain was "struck by how out of touch with American politics" Biden was, and after watching the president appear "fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged" during limited prep sessions, he "feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster."

Klain offered a remarkably different account several days after the debate in July 2024. "As the president said, he had a bad night, his practices were better, and he was tired from all the back and forth travel around the world, and was suffering from a cold that really constrained his voice and constrained his ability to be forceful in the debate," Klain said on MSNBC. "But the president is absolutely sharp, fit, on top of his game. People can see that for themselves. You don’t have to take my word for it."

Mike Donilon

The longtime Biden adviser "swears he never saw the president mentally diminished," according to Whipple. It sounds absurd because it is. Few people interacted with Biden more than Donilon. He was among the small group of advisers who, according to Allen and Parnes, "formed a cocoon around Biden that tightened and hardened with each passing month" during the 2024 campaign. He attended the same debate sessions that had "startled" Klain. The most charitable explanation, Whipple writes, is that Donilon and others in Biden's inner circle "believed what they wanted to believe" out of a "desire to cling to power."

The authors of Fight report that Donilon was indeed desperate to maintain his White House perks. "Nobody walks away from this," Donilon told a prominent Democrat. "No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter." Another Biden ally recalls: "Donilon was one hundred percent. All of the people around him. They’re my friends but for a lot of them, this was job security and this was as good a job as they’re ever gonna get." Donilon's attitude toward the Democrats, who called on Biden to drop out of the race, Allen and Parnes write, "amounted to 'Fuck them.'" Now that the perks are gone, a bitter Donilon has accused Democratic leaders of sabotaging Biden's campaign. "Lots of people have terrible debates," he said at a Harvard event in February. "Usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind. But that’s what happened—it just melted down."

Jamal Simmons

While serving as Kamala Harris's communications director in 2023, Simmons "developed an entire messaging plan" to prepare for the possibility that Biden could die in office. He compiled a spreadsheet of federal judges and their place of residence that Simmons carried with him while traveling with Harris. The goal was to be able to get Harris sworn in as president as quickly as possible in the event of Biden's demise. "Anything can happen to any president, Simmons thought. But the likelihood of Biden dying is greater," Allen and Parnes explained in Fight.

Simmons, who left the VP's office later that year for a commentator gig at CNN, was among the many Democrats who defended Biden by accusing Republicans of promoting "fake" videos and other forms of misinformation about the president's health. "The president of the United States' body moves a little slower, but his mind is just as quick as ever," Simmons said on CNN several days before the disastrous debate. "So these [videos of Biden wandering around like a dementia patient] are cheap fakes—what the White House and Biden people call them—I think we all need to be a little careful about what it is that we put out there." Alas, his prediction that Biden's upcoming debate performance would prove that the president was capable of serving another term did not pan out.

Barack Obama

The former president was "shocked" but "not surprised" when Biden bragged about finally beating Medicare on the debate stage, according to Allen and Parnes. "Obama knew from experience how the job aged a man, and he could see the effects when he watched Biden on television and in their rare joint appearances." One of those appearances was at a Hollywood fundraiser that made headlines after a video clip showed Obama gingerly leading Biden off stage after the president appeared to freeze up. In their first conversation after the debate, Obama tried to "subtly guide Biden toward his own conclusion that there was no light at the end of this tunnel."

Obama did not share these views publicly. Instead, he meekly offered support for the president like a total coward, a move that undermined his own desire to see Biden leave the race. "Bad debate nights happen," he wrote on X. "Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November." 

After Biden dropped out, Obama campaigned passionately for Harris despite telling Democrats in private conversations that she was a bad candidate who would "lose to Trump."

Nancy Pelosi

The former House speaker knew Biden wasn't in great shape. "In between roll call votes on the House floor several hours before the debate, lawmakers confessed their fears of a Trump romp to Pelosi," Allen and Parnes write. "Biden did not look sharp. Some suspected that his limited contact with them—and avoidance of the media—suggested an even steeper decline." Pelosi had been among those urging Biden not to debate Trump because she wasn't confident in his ability to avoid public humiliation.

Nevertheless, Pelosi persisted in praising Biden. Three weeks prior to the debate disaster, she attacked the Wall Street Journal for reporting that Biden "had shown signs of slipping." Pelosi slammed the "hit piece" and insisted that Democrats in Congress were impressed by the president's "wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking." She continued to applaud Biden's intellectual fortitude, albeit in more muted terms, in the days following the debate. "When I debate with him about legislation—and not debate, but discuss it with him, he’s right there," Pelosi said on CNN. "It was a bad night. It was a great presidency."

Hillary Clinton

Ironically, the notorious liar may have been one of the only Democrats telling the truth when she defended Biden's initial decision to stay in the race. She appears to have genuinely believed that Biden was perfectly healthy and capable of serving another four years. Hillary hadn't spent much time with the president, but her own narcissism compelled her to sympathize with the octogenarian (and fellow) narcissist. She "saw herself in the Republican attacks and TV punditry focused on Biden's condition," according to the authors of Fight. "She certainly didn’t think there was anything wrong with him," one Clinton ally said. "She is someone who has had her health questioned for twenty years and knows that this kind of stuff is bullshit."

The morning after the debate in June 2024, Hillary leapt to the president's defense. "The choice in this election remains very simple," she wrote on X. "I'll be voting Biden." Hillary and her nominal husband, accused rapist Bill Clinton, privately urged Democratic donors to stick with Biden, according to a CNN report published on July 20, 2024. Biden dropped out the next day. 

Sen. Cotton Educates - China Challenge

Sen. Cotton Educates the Nation About the China Challenge

Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics

Stewart’s rant revolved around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, home to China’s only lab that specializes in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. This fact alone, Stewart contended with growing manic intensity and to Colbert’s increasing dismay, led to an obvious and inescapable conclusion. The novel, highly contagious, and unusually deadly coronavirus – which first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019 and by the spring of 2020 brought nations around the world to their knees – was created in and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sen. Tom Cotton understands as well as anyone the many ways that Americans collaborate with the CCP to stifle the reporting of facts and the expression of judgments that the party does not want heard. In early 2020, he was the first prominent national officeholder to offer the common-sense opinion that the novel coronavirus, which had begun to attract attention in the West, might have been produced in a Chinese lab. Bastions of progressivism such as the New York Times and the Washington Post and eminent scientists pilloried him for peddling despicable conspiracy theories. Recently, Andrew Noymer – associate professor in population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health – confirmed that the evidence overwhelmingly favors a lab leak.

Sen. Cotton also understands as well as anyone the severity and several dimensions of the China challenge. In his New York Times #1 bestselling book, “Seven Things You Can’t Say About China,” Arkansas’ junior senator “lays out the real and pressing threat from Chinese Communists based on established facts and the inherent logic of events.” His new book (he generously mentions me in the acknowledgments) is “not partisan or a ‘yellow peril’ screed.” And he is careful to “stress that Chinese communism is the threat, not the ancient Chinese civilization or the Chinese people, the first and worst victims of Chinese communis

Cotton’s short book accomplishes two interrelated tasks. It exposes the thoughtlessness as well as the dishonorable motives behind the coverup of the China challenge by American government officials, major corporations, the media, and university administrations. And it clarifies the CCP’s ambitions – which drive its depredations in China and its predatory conduct directed at the United States and at nations around the world – to impose an authoritarian cast on world order and position Beijing at its center.

Cotton devotes a chapter to each of seven truths that America’s elites have ignored, obscured, or denied.

First, “China is an evil empire.” At home, the CCP “has built a dystopian police state to monitor, manipulate, and master its people,” writes Cotton. The party especially targets Christians, Tibetans, the Falun Gong (a Chinese spiritual movement), and ethnic Mongolians. It is committing genocide against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang in northwest China. And it has enfeebled freedom and democracy in Hong Kong.

Second, “China is preparing for war.” The CCP “has undertaken the largest peacetime military buildup in history, amassing the biggest and second most advanced armed forces in the world,” according to Cotton. In addition, it “has claimed hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, built and militarized artificial islands, and expanded its overseas military presence.” And it “openly threatens war against Taiwan.”

Third, “China is waging economic world war.” Cotton dates the onset of the CCP’s global economic warfare to 2000, when “the United States granted China permanent most-favored-nation status. This “provided China with generous trading terms” and “enabled China to join the World Trade Organization the next year.” Since then, the CCP “has stolen trillions of dollars of wealth, crippled entire industries, seized control of developing technologies, destroyed millions of American jobs, and extorted entire countries with its newfound economic power.” The CCP also has devoted massive resources to the Belt and Road Initiative, “a web of roads, railroads, pipelines, power plants, ports, and other infrastructure projects.” With the BRI, the CCP aims “to spread its military, economic, and political influence across Asia and Europe, gain leverage over borrowing nations, employ its workers, and enrich its companies.”

Fourth, “China has infiltrated our society.” By restricting or barring access to its enormous consumer markets – even by threatening to do so – the CCP strong-arms Hollywood, professional athletes, media, higher education, corporate America, and Wall Street to eliminate references to CCP oppression and Taiwanese freedom and democracy.

Fifth, “China has infiltrated our government.” The CCP, Cotton reports, has “spied on our military, stolen our weapons technology, courted state and local politicians, and cultivated a powerful New China Lobby in Washington to pressure your elected representatives.”

Sixth, “China is coming for our kids.” Directed by its parent company ByteDance, which is headquartered in China and operates under CCP supervision, TikTok harms young Americans: It invades their privacy by collecting reams of personal data about them; it inundates them with pornography and other content that encourages self-destructive behavior; and it bombards them with pro-China and anti-American propaganda. Furthermore, by funding Confucious Classrooms at American schools and Confucious Institutes at American universities, the CCP buys from principals and university presidents cooperation in ensuring that their faculty and administrators speak only well of China. And the CCP fuels America’s fentanyl crisis, either producing, or supplying Mexico with the ingredients to manufacture, the deadly drug, “which is fifty times stronger than heroin.”

Seventh, “China could win.” Cotton cautions that the CCP may acquire the ability to overturn the American-led, post-World War II international system. Whereas American global dominance favors freedom and democracy, a world order dominated by Beijing would empower authoritarian nations and license abuse of human rights in the name of collective values. Taiwan, Cotton argues, is the key. It “manufactures around 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.” For this reason alone, if CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping fulfills his promise to conquer the island located some 100 miles from mainland China, he would trigger a severe worldwide depression. The fall of Taiwan would also, Cotton warns, embolden America’s enemies and dispirit America’s friends, spark the proliferation of nuclear weapons, erode American influence in the international economy, and, quite possibly, precipitate the subjugation of Washington to Beijing.

Cotton supplements these seven truths about the CCP’s nefarious conduct and intentions with seven steps American citizens must take to meet the China challenge. Citizens should stay informed about the myriad ways that the CCP imperils American freedom. We should inform friends and family about the dangers. We should vote for candidates who make a priority of prevailing against China. We should refuse to use, and keep our families off, Chinese apps. We should reduce purchases of products made in China. We should increase purchases of products made in America. And, counsels the hard-headed statesman and Army combat veteran, we should “pray for the Chinese people, the first and worst victims of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The Trump administration and Congress must also rise to the moment. President Trump needs to address his fellows citizens about the China challenge, laying out the threat and rallying the nation. Prominent among the president’s proposals should be a reduction of American reliance on the Chinese economy through targeted economic measures that strengthen America’s – and its friends’ and partners’ – manufacturing capabilities in select areas starting, say, with biopharmaceuticals, rare minerals, and semiconductors. The president should also explain how his administration will ensure American military superiority. And, with a view to the long term, the president should encourage Congress to create programs to promote advanced study among scholars, diplomats, and military analysts of Chinese language, culture, history, political institutions, and forms of empire.

To meet the China challenge, we must understand its several dimensions, not least the CCP’s efforts to thwart such understanding.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.