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Only last week I recalled Gene Smith’s best-selling account of the end of the Wilson presidency When the Cheering Stopped. My paperback copy gives it the subtitle The Strange, Untold Story of the Last Years of Woodrow Wilson!, although part of that was a Bantam Books embellishment. I predicted that an enterprising historian will do Smith’s number on the Biden presidency.

It’s not much of a prediction. The story of Biden’s incapacity to hold the office of president has been hiding in plain sight over the past five years. We have documented it regularly on this site. As I wrote earlier this year, we have been on the demential beat since 2020.

In 2021 we were contacted by NewsGuard with a set of emailed questions about Power Line. This was Question 3 submitted to us by NewsGuard deputy editor John Gregory:

We’ve noticed that the site has repeatedly stated as fact in its article[s] that Joe Biden has dementia, both during the 2020 election cycle and since he became president. Why does the site make this claim without providing credible evidence that he has dementia?

Gregory cited John’s post “Are Biden’s aides afraid of him?” (August 22, 2021), in which John observed: “Is it plausible that White House aides are afraid of Joe Biden? Like many elderly people suffering from dementia, he can be querulous in public. We can imagine what he must be like behind closed doors.” In July 2023, Alex Thompson vindicated John’s imagination precisely in his Axios story “Old yeller: Biden’s private fury.”

Gregory also cited “Biden’s decline continues apace” (July 8, 2021). Here John made this observation:

Joe Biden’s downhill slide into dementia continues. What is remarkable is not so much that Biden has lost most of the modest faculties he once possessed, although he is rather young to be so badly impaired. What is remarkable is that we have a press determined not to notice that our president lacks normal–let alone outstanding!–mental function.

As we all know, John was on the money, both with respect to Biden’s cognitive impairment and the cooperation of the corporate press in turning a blind eye and/or covering it up.

The Wall Street Journal dipped its toes into the story in late June of this year. I wrote about the story in “Biden’s dementia.” Today the Journal returns with a long feature under four bylines (with two contributors) to tell us: “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge.” Subhead: “Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.”

Biden of course remains the nominal president. One is tempted to say now they tell us, but we didn’t really need the Journal to tell us.