It is by now clear that there has been a longterm, all-hands-on-deck effort to systematically deceive, strenuously misinform, and painstakingly lie to the country and the world about President Biden’s declining physical and mental state. Just how much coordination this deceit has required on the part of his cohort is not clear, but it is certainly clear that the perpetuation of the central untruth here, which is that Joe Biden is perfectly fit for the job of Commander in Chief and will continue to be so for four more years, has been aided and abetted by the silence of a lot of people who were too scared of personal and professional repercussions to correct the untruth out loud.
I have been thinking about lying. It is such a complicated thing. It is caught up in such complicating factors as self-delusion, aspects of dementia. Biden may be lying, but he seems to me to be mostly unaware that he is doing so. Trump lies as a style of communication, and for some reason, any schmuck who makes the error of trying to separate out his lies into discrete, incorrect data points somehow comes out looking dumber than the liar himself. I don’t know why this is, but it is so. We are so used to the way he carries on that we can usually tell when he slips up and says something true, which does happen.
Sometime in 2015 or 2016, the liberal media, stunned by the rise of Trump, started taking it upon itself to treat the news not as opportunities to reveal the truth and defang his lies, but to join in the lying, justifying their lies with the truth, which was that Trump really does represent a unique danger to the republic. Finally, each of us, trying to enjoy or at least survive our own lives, indulges in lying to ourselves and our friends and colleagues, to get through the day.
“Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” was the title of Al Franken’s 2003 book. He was referring then to such charming fibs as George Bush’s disingenuousness, Bill O’Reilly’s resume distortions, and Ann Coulter’s bombastic exaggerations. It was a good start. Certainly Donald Trump would never have been possible without Fox News, so Franken helped to do some stage setting. But I think he should write a sequel, and he might start with the plainly ridiculous lie that forced him, a smart, effective, and reasonable Democratic senator, out of his job. The lie, in that case, was that a comedian like him, goofing off and behaving in mildly inappropriate ways on camera, deserved to be viewed in the same light as Harvey Weinstein. In retrospect, I see the highly consequential lie about Al Franken as well as other “Me Too” era overreaches—the absurd motto “Believe All Women,” the attempted cancellation of Aziz Ansari for a date gone wrong—as pretty good hints that the distinction between truth and untruth was getting, at best, blurry, and might be well on its way to obliteration.
Over the past two decades, the lies have deepened, widened, and expanded to the point where lying is now atmospheric. We breathe it in; we exhale it out. It suffuses the body politic; it pervades our common life. A lying culture depends upon the silence of the majority, who either don’t recognize the lies or do recognize them but are too scared to point them out. The most consequential lie we are contending with now is the lie that President Biden is not debilitated and is perfectly fit for the job of commander in chief of the most powerful nation on Earth, and Donald Trump had nothing to do with that. A big Trump-fearing infrastructure made up of Washington insiders of all stripes had everything to do with that.
There have been truth-tellers among us, and their good deeds have been suitably punished. Robert Hur was the special counsel lawyer who looked into Biden’s possible misuse of classified documents and reported at the end that the president was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur, in retrospects, seems not to have been a partisan hack behaving in a gratuitously cruel fashion, as everyone painted him at the time, but was accurately reporting the truth. President Biden and his circle were furious to see the truth in print, so for anyone who might have been working up the courage to agree with Hur, it was probably not a hard choice between the truth and their personal and professional interests.
The many would-be voices of sanity have been rendered mute by an unspoken “Though shalt not speak of the obvious thing happening in front of your eyes” rule. It is a very old phenomenon. We die alone, and our survival demands social acceptance. We are understandably terrified of speaking the truth and losing everything for it. Timur Kuran, writing this week for The Free Press, explains that the truth didn’t have a chance, thanks to the atomization of those who might have shared it:
Although the private doubters of nominating Biden may have had the edge numerically against his genuine supporters, the doubters had no way to mobilize. Because they kept their private truths hidden, they could not even find each other, much less coordinate their actions and form an effective anti-Biden coalition.
Among the tragic ironies of failing to say out loud what you know to be true is that you don’t learn until it is too late that most people agreed with you.
We never learn a lesson, do we? Shakespeare reminded us, in 1597, “in the end truth will out.” Truth always outs itself. Both the aggressive denial or passive acceptance of the obvious untruth that Biden is up to his job speak to a sort of internal decadence unique to the Western world. We aim first and foremost to maximize comfort and minimize unpleasantness, to make things easy like a Sunday morning, a TV dinner, or ordering an Uber. For the past four years, when it came to President Biden’s fitness for office, we had an easy status quo lie that was helping us get through our days, and Rober Hur then blew it up. The simple truth he stated had been living in the back of our collective consciousness, kept successfully at bay.
Joe Biden, most people agree, is a good man. But to remain on the current path means he will be remembered as a silly, selfish, delusional old man, and that is so very sad, so painfully ironic. “It’s the economy, stupid” isn’t really our political mantra, it’s “What have you done for me lately?” Biden quoted exactly this question in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday. If the thing Joe Biden has most lately done for us is destroy any plausible opportunity to defeat Donald Trump, that will be his legacy. It is not fair, but it is true.
