If the press reported truthfully, everything since 2016 would have been different.

Joe Biden’s best defense, I’ve said before, is that he really was senile. Was he even consulted when his staff leaked to the New York Times in April 2022 that the president wanted his attorney general to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump for Jan. 6? Was he consulted in 2020 when a Central Intelligence Agency cabal decided to frame Russia for his son’s laptop?

What if the election had been close and disputed? What if there had been violence? What if CIA and FBI rogues tried to intervene and “fix” things? The country would have had to rely not just on a lame-duck President Biden to see it through to a contested Trump inauguration, but a President Biden who was mentally and physically impaired as well as distraught and embittered over his displacement by Kamala Harris.

The claim now is that Mr. Biden’s stumbles and verbal miscues were all properly noted and reported at the time. Only after the election were “insiders” willing to tell us what they saw on the inside, which was “much worse,” says CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Fine. But something else was visible at the time. The alleged Trump menace was deliberately fluffed and promoted by the Biden administration to make the press and fellow Democrats shut up about Mr. Biden’s condition.

When people see disaster coming a long way off, they usually do something about it. The press did, via its own role in the Biden grift. This role consisted of making sure—to voters and elites alike, who could see what was going on with their own eyes—that the grift seemed like a thing that couldn’t be challenged without helping Mr. Trump.

This failure, I’m here to tell you, was continuous with the press’s failure to admit that collusion was a lie, its failure to admit that the claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop had the “hallmarks” of Russian intelligence was a lie, etc.

All through this period, the Times’s Thomas Edsall wrote countless 3,000-word pieces citing academics on Mr. Trump’s incipient Hitlerism. His constant subject was voter attitudes, yet not once did the ancient and esteemed Mr. Edsall acknowledge that the three-year-long Russia fraud ever happened or had any role in causing 152 million Americans in 2020 and 2024 to repudiate the establishment in favor of Mr. Trump.

And, no, this isn’t strange. Humans are intensely social animals. Our psychology and behaviors are rooted in an evolved obsession with status, i.e., our standing with others. According to the Population Reference Bureau, 117 billion humans have existed since our species emerged 200,000 years ago. How many of these humans ever used their brains for any purpose other than servicing their need to be in accord with those around them?

Yet had journalists been honest in the expected journalistic way, acknowledging what was in front of their faces, the past 10 years would have been completely different. Neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Trump would probably have ended up his party’s nominee in 2024.

This week comes the long-awaited Biden exposé book. One of its authors, Axios’s Alex Thompson, you probably never heard of—he reported skeptically on Mr. Biden’s competence from early on.

Would he even have gotten a book deal if his coauthor weren’t Mr. Tapper, to make sure the story was framed as an “insider coverup” rather than as a continuous pattern of press conformity and lickspittleism?

Without benefit of insider whispering, in one of several columns calling for Mr. Biden’s resignation, I pointed to the president’s evident helplessness even to manage his own son when the Justice Department offered a gracious exit from Hunter’s legal troubles. Now the book tells us Mr. Biden’s deterioration proceeded in tandem with Hunter’s legal problems.

As early as April 2021, I observed that Mr. Biden’s “Jim Crow” diatribes against an anodyne Georgia election law “sounded like a man riffing on a few poorly understood lines that somebody fed him, making himself a prop for an agenda that he may not quite grasp.” Now Mr. Tapper tells us Mr. Biden wouldn’t have been president if Covid hadn’t allowed him to be hidden from voters during the 2020 campaign.

A particular brand of dishonesty the press has come to specialize in: disingenuousness, or pretending to know or understand less than it does. Mr. Trump’s own defining political quality has been his bottomless cynicism about the game of politics and the people who play it, including the media. On this he’s proved right again and again.

By July 2023, hiding Mr. Biden’s frailty from voters had become more than a convenience, I said. It was his only hope of victory. But the Trump prosecutions bogged down. Mr. Trump was leading in the polls. There was a patriotic choice to be made, but instead Mr. Donilon, who was reportedly demanding and expecting to be paid $4 million for nine months’ work on the campaign, proposed a Hail Mary: Get the now-unavoidable debate out of the way early in hopes that the remaining campaign could be refocused on Trump-the-antichrist rather than Mr. Biden’s dodderingness. You know the rest of the story.

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Source: The Biden Coverup Coverup – WSJ