Follow this authorMarc A. Thiessen's opinions

“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur continues. Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

Advertisement

The report adds that Biden’s “memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” adding that “among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”

Hur concludes that jurors would likely find “Mr. Biden’s apparent lapses and failures” in sharing classified information with his ghostwriter in 2017 “consistent with the diminished faculties and faulty memory he showed in Zwonitzer’s interview recordings and in our interview of him.”

As a columnist without a medical degree, I am in no position to diagnose Biden, and neither are most Americans. But we see what we see — how his gait has stiffened and his ability to answer simple questions has declined. Which is why multiple polls show that 76 percent of American voters believe Biden is too old to effectively serve another term as president and 54 percent say he no longer has “the competence to carry out the job of president.”

Advertisement

That was based on his public appearances. But the special counsel’s description of his private interactions raises these concerns to Defcon 1. If the president is this confused in his meetings with Justice Department lawyers, how bad are his interactions with world leaders or his meetings with his own national security officials in the Situation Room? During the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Biden falsely claimed that none of his military advisers had recommended leaving a residual force of 2,500 troops, only to have those military leaders testify that they had in fact given him that advice. Did he lie, or did he simply not recall what they had told him? Which is worse?

A few weeks ago, much of Washington was outraged by a defense secretary who failed to disclose a serious medical condition and undermined the military chain of command. Well, now we have reason to be concerned about the man at the top of that chain of command.

Biden’s news conference Thursday, in which he angrily defended his mental acuity (“I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing”) only made things worse. He referred to President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt as the........

© Washington Post