The Emperor Has No Clothes

The June 27 presidential debate was a watershed moment for America. In the words of Bari Weiss, writing hours after its conclusion, “rarely have so many lies been dispelled in a single moment.” The debate was a disaster for Biden, whose obvious cognitive decline was laid bare for the entire country to see. 

But videos depicting Biden’s struggles in painstaking detail have been circulating the Internet for months. Biden has been caught on camera looking confused while meeting major world leaders, attending significant global events, and delivering his own speeches. And he doesn’t just look a little out of sorts; he forgets entire sentences, he trails off, he needs to be led from place to place by his own wife, and sometimes he entirely freezes. 

The president’s deteriorating condition should have been blatantly obvious to even casual observers for months now. But to the left and its counterparts in the media, using your own eyes with Joe Biden was deemed an unforgiveable sin. Anyone who dared cast the slightest aspersion on the 81-year-old’s health was deemed a Trumper, an ageist, an idiot, or at best the victim of “deep fakes” and “right-wing misinformation.” I can attest to the fury — when I pointed out a video of Biden freezing up at a Juneteenth event and suggested that it could be a sign of a progressive central neurological disorder, something I’ve studied extensively during my training as a doctor, I was dismissed as a conservative shill and brushed off as “not a diagnostician,” as if the signs weren’t obvious even to someone with significantly less formal medical training. 

Rather than acknowledging what so many Americans can clearly see, the left instead has been running a concerted effort to deny reality. When the Wall Street Journal ran a piece interviewing 45 people about Biden’s age — and concluding that there are serious concerns — the administration and its media counterparts sprang to the defense, dismissing it as a hit job and even calling for a retraction. White House spokesman Andrew Bates called the age concerns “false claims” that undercut Biden’s stature as a “savvy” leader. Even as recently as the week before the debate, The New York Times ran a comprehensive piece entitled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts,” in which three reporters analyzed different angles of footage from the president and concluded that the videos are “clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused.”  

Where is this “clear manipulation” argument now, after millions of Americans tuned into the debate and saw the president’s confusion for themselves? Well, it’s nowhere to be found in the major media, which turned on Biden in a second. The morning after the debate, The New York Times opinion page was lined with calls from every corner for the president to suspend his reelection campaign. Staunch Democrats such as Rachel Maddow hopped onto the morning news to point out Biden’s “weak” delivery after spending months assuring her viewers of his fitness for the presidential office. 

The clear takeaway from the left’s swift 180 is that we have been gaslit by people who obviously knew better. Rather than letting Americans believe their own two eyes, the left has been denying politically inconvenient reality — and smearing anyone who dares state the facts as insane. If not for Biden’s horrendous debate performance, they would have kept papering over his cognitive decline all the way until November. 

Now that his age-related struggles are on full display, however, it is time for Americans to yank our heads out of the sand and get back in touch with reality. Biden’s decline is an issue not because there is something inherently wrong with aging, but because he is running to continue being the commander-in-chief of our country at one of the most precarious times in recent global memory. If his feebleness is glaringly apparent to the American public, imagine how it looks to our enemies. Russian warships were spotted near Florida. Iran is on its ninth month of a bloody proxy terrorist spree. China is eyeing Taiwan with ever-growing hunger. This is not the time to have a president whose weakness readily presents itself for the world to see.  

Biden’s decline is an issue not because there is something inherently wrong with aging, but because he is running to continue being the commander-in-chief of our country at one of the most precarious times in recent global memory. 

The only language our foreign adversaries understand is strength, which is why we need a leader who projects it. Our country cannot afford to have a president who is weak in both policy and physical appearance. It is a national security threat, an embarrassment, and a danger to our standing on the world stage at a time when our stature matters more than ever. Despite the left’s best efforts, the emperor has been shown without his clothes — and now it’s up to the American public to react accordingly.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician whose family escaped to America from Iran. She stars in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Skin Decision: Before and After.“