Conservatives See a Conspiracy Around Joe Biden’s Stumbles
The right has become obsessed with the media after the president’s bad debate.
Since before the 2020 election, Republicans and their conservative allies have loudly proclaimed that Joe Biden’s lack of mental fitness disqualifies him from America’s highest office. Now, in the wake of the president’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate, many of those same voices are taking up a different rallying cry: We told you so. And the media covered it up.
The collective post-debate gloating from conservatives is in full swing this week, as Democrats reckon with the ongoing political fallout. But the immediate response on the right has focused less on the fact of Biden’s potential mental decline than on alleging that Democrats and the mainstream press colluded to hide it.
In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington on Monday, Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller decried the “Biden cognition hoax,” claiming (without citing specific evidence) that senior Democrats had conspired with sympathetic elements in the media to hide the truth about the president’s health. “The biggest hoax in history has been exposed,” said Miller, who is expected to assume a senior position in a possible second Trump White House. “Anybody who’s anybody in the Democratic Party participated in, knew of and covered up Biden’s cognitive dysfunction while allowing secret unnamed staffers to run the country.”
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine at the same conference on Tuesday, former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said “I think now this will go down as another journalistic failure that has betrayed the public by running interference for Biden [and] obfuscating the truth that the man is in what appears to be severe cognitive decline.”
Conservatives’ intense focus on alleged collusion between senior Democratic officials and the mainstream media is hardly unprecedented: Trump and his allies have accused the “fake news” of Democratic bias since 2016. Nor is it fully backed up, as the media had covered concerns about Biden’s age many times before the debate. But this new round of media bashing underscores the extent to which the modern Republican Party now defines itself in terms of opposition to what it perceives as a corrupt establishment — or a liberal “regime” — that includes both the Democratic Party and the mainstream media.
In his prime-time monologue on Tuesday night, Fox News host Sean Hannity singled out the “cabal of Biden enablers and liars and state-run media” for seeking to obscure Biden’s health. “The charade, the cover-up, the corruption, the lying is now officially over,” said Hannity — who, like Miller, did not cite specific evidence of a coordinated cover-up. “It has been obvious that Joe was never up to the job, but the media mob did their best to cover this up and lie for him for years.”
In his speech at the National Conservatism Conference — which serves as a big-tent gathering for the populist and nationalist right — Miller made plain the electoral stakes of that argument. “Our task … is to make the case to the American people that a party that is so hell-bent on power that it is willing to engineer a conspiracy of this scope and magnitude must be booted from the halls of power in a thunderous fashion this November,” Miller said.
Ramaswamy explained that conservatives view the media’s role in the debate debacle “in the context of the last four years” of what he alleged was collusion between the media and the Democratic Party. “If on the eve of the last election, we had not seen the Hunter Biden laptop story dismissed as Russian disinformation and suppressed and silenced by social media companies in a systematic way — and if the election before that, you hadn’t seen the Russia collusion hoax that has been broadly disproven — then I don’t think that in this context, people would focus on the media dimension of this,” Ramaswamy said. “This seems like the latest avatar of what we’ve seen for the last couple of cycles.”
This response, however, has created a sort of fun-house mirror effect, where Republicans and Biden skeptics on the left criticize the media for not covering Biden’s age enough (even as it continues to dominate headlines), while the president’s defenders attack the media for focusing too much on his recent struggles, which the White House has claimed to be a “blip.”
Others at NatCon, as the conference is known, went even further than Ramaswamy, pointing to the media’s relative silence on the question of Biden’s mental fitness as a consequence of the inner workings of “the regime” — a term that some conservatives use to describe the supposedly interconnected power network of senior political leaders and elite media.
“The years-long effort by Biden administration flunkies, Democratic Party poohbahs, and pro-Regime media stenographers to forcefully deny Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline will go down as the single greatest lie in American history,” wrote Josh Hammer, a conservative editor-at-large at Newsweek, who spoke at NatCon, in a column earlier this week.
In a speech at NatCon, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec denounced Biden as a “corpse puppeteered by the deep state” and seized on his debate performance as a symbol of a broader decline. “Liberalism itself is Joe Biden — a senile, selfish remnant of a failed world order,” said Posobiec. “And just like Joe Biden, neoliberalism has no juice left in the tank. Like Biden, it is dying.”