Just a few headlines that ran during Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House not that long ago:
New York Times, February 2017: “Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?”
Vanity Fair, January 2018: “Has the Trump Dementia Coup Already Happened?”
Newsweek, January 2019: “Joe Scarborough Calls for 25th Amendment After Trump Cabinet Meeting, Says President Is ‘Not Fit to Hold the Office'”
Media talk about Trump’s mental fitness for office was routine during his presidency, just one ingredient in the hysteria crockpot that journalists and TV people in Washington and New York heated up for the purpose of kneecapping his agenda. It went into hyperdrive after the 2018 publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, a fantastical book about the Trump White House that the author admitted was in no small part fictionalized. Even so, the refrain by people like Joe Scarborough on MSNBC was that its content “rings true,” thereby permitting them all to assert endless wild claims about the president operating with a junk brain.
In light of last week’s astonishing debate performance by the current president, let’s just talk about the dishonesty and disrepute of Scarborough.
Just three months ago, Scarborough was heralding Biden’s unparalleled genius and mental aptitude. “I’ve said it for years now, he’s cogent,” he said on his MSNBC show. “But I undersold it when I said he was cogent. He’s far beyond cogent. In fact I think he’s better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically.” He added, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever — not a close second.”
A few weeks later on the same show, Scarborough declared Biden’s intelligence to be “lightyears ahead” of any Republican leader in Congress.
Fast forward to the morning after Biden’s gasp-inducing appearance at the debate with Trump, and Scarborough’s enthusiasm for the intellectual giant had quelled. “He can run the White House, he can run the country effectively … but can he run for president in 2024?” he said, before complaining that Biden was the victim of lies by the former president. Nonetheless, Scarborough said Biden, “missed one layup after another, after another” and concluded that he “may not be up for the job.”
This is an attempt by the bespectacled host to acknowledge the obvious — Biden’s striking mental decline — while also insisting that he remains capable of being president. On the one hand, Scarborough asserts that Biden can “run the White House.” On the other, he “may not be up for the job.”
If Scarborough weren’t a deceptive and despicable person, he would do what he did the last time he claimed to have witnessed an incapacitated president. He would call for an exercise of the 25th Amendment, thereby relieving the commander-in-chief of his duties.
After Trump hosted a lengthy on-camera meeting with his full cabinet in early 2019, Scarborough, for no discernible reason, said he should be removed from office. “If we had a cabinet that was filled with people with more character … and if we had a House and a Senate that took their jobs seriously,” he said, “there would be people going up to the White House this morning saying, ‘Mr. President, questions abound whether you are fit for this office. If this continues, we are going to ask your cabinet to take a vote on whether you are fit for office and invoke the 25th Amendment.'”
Admittedly, I’d rather not see that process play out and instead just hope for the best. The alternative to Biden is the swearing in of President Kamala Harris. Between that and the current Oval Office occupant who reportedly begins to sundown at 4 p.m., I’ll take my chances with the latter.
Scarborough has no excuse. He professed to believe in swift execution of the constitutional removal of a president of whom “questions abound whether you are fit for this office.” That is, by definition, Joe Biden. And it’s not from Republicans. It’s from the president’s own party and, at risk of being redundant, Scarborough’s peers in the media.
So get going, Joe! Call on all those character-filled people in the president’s cabinet to do the right thing.
He won’t. He’s just a liar who nobody should ever take seriously.
