Gaslighting America to the bitter end, eh? At least Joe Biden is consistent. And just as consistently bad at it, too.
Biden has kicked off his memoir tour, and already his memory has proven … flawed, let us say. In this clip from an interview with People Magazine, in which he claims to “have all my faculties,” Biden describes his debate with Donald Trump in June 2024 as “inconsequential.” Left unexplained is why Biden withdrew from the election three weeks after this “inconsequential” event (via Twitchy):
Joe Biden now claims his 2024 presidential debate against President Trump, which forced him to drop out of the race, was not very consequential: “To me it was not very consequential. First of all I thought there would be another debate, which there wasn’t. Notwithstanding the fact that there wasn’t another debate, it didn’t disturb me because it wasn’t consequential.” Just 24 days after the “not very consequential” presidential debate, Joe Biden ended his campaign for President.
— Steve Cortes (@SteveCortes) November 11, 2026
To quote our 46th president: Come on, man. Don’t be a lying, dog-faced pony soldier. It’s not clear who Biden thinks he’s fooling with this argument, but not even his most ardent fans will swallow a claim that the debate was “inconsequential.” There’s spin, and then there’s micturating on noggins while pretending it’s precipitation. This goes far enough toward the latter that the publisher of Biden‘s memoir should offer a free umbrella and plastic hoodie with the purchase.
Biden then tries to blame his performance in the debate on his prostate cancer, which was disclosed after the election. That’s gaslighting on another level. Biden didn’t have just one bad night, which he might have survived in a political sense. Ronald Reagan had a bad first debate against Walter Mondale and bounced back so effectively in the next that Mondale told people he knew he’d lost the election that night.
Biden laments that he didn’t get another debate, but that’s because Biden’s cognitive decline had become so obvious to the public by then that there was no going back. For almost the entirety of his presidency, Biden had barely interacted with reporters. His press conferences were highly controlled affairs, with cheat cards provided to Biden and questions apparently submitted in advance. Before and especially after the April 2022 Easter Bunny intervention, the White House had to keep insisting that Biden was “sharp as a tack™” and “running rings around aides half his age” while mumbling in public and getting lost on stage. The only gaslighting missing from this interview is a treatise on “cheap fakes.”
The obvious truth is that not only was the June 2024 debate consequential, it was also arguably the most consequential debate in modern American history. It forced a major-party nominee to withdraw from an election, the first time a presidential debate ever had that result. That makes it more consequential than Reagan’s comeback debate performance in 1984, and that debate resulted in a 49-state landslide. Anyone who argues that the June 2024 debate was inconsequential either has cognitive issues or an axe to grind. Or both.
If this is the level of credibility, honesty, and insight we can expect from the memoir, I’ll just buy my own umbrella, thank you very much.
The full video from People is below, and it raises an obvious question: How many takes did it require to make Biden sound coherent? Robert Hur wants to know.
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