BY PAUL T HORGAN

That Donald Trump lies profusely appears to be the standard mantra of the news media. So-called expert fact-checkers are always poised to pounce on all of his utterings, and will invariably find something questionable. 

The re-purposing of pet animals as foodstuffs by a wave of immigrants is a prime example. Local residents in Springfield Ohio started making these claims, but without evidence to the standard of impartial journalistic inquiry. However, this has to be considered in the light of the depressing truth that on any matter connected to Donald Trump, there is no such thing as impartial journalism. The journalists and others who denounce Trump as a liar try to create the impression that, excepting Trump, all other American politicians (with the clear exception of George Santos) are as pure and wholesome as a living embodiment of Pollyanna at best, or Cindy Brady at worst. 

Trump’s lies are not excusable, but neither is focusing on them to the exclusion of the flaws and misdeeds of other politicians. It may be Soviet-style whataboutism, but all of Trump’s political rivals and their supporters have told some absolute whoppers, but them being caught out is always diluted in the media churn, which says rather too much about the leanings of modern mainstream media at every level. Trump is not unique in how he does politics. But you would not think so from the coverage of American politics.

The biggest lie in American politics was not anything to do with Trump’s actions or words. In fact, the lie is so big that no-one has really commented on it in much detail. This may be because if this big lie gained maximum visibility, it would only have been to the benefit of Donald Trump, and the mainstream media could not allow this to happen.

This biggest lie is that Joe Biden was, for the last four years, a fully functioning and capable human being, and able to satisfactorily discharge his duties as US President to a proper standard.

In the years leading up to the denouement of his final debate with Trump, the fiction was maintained that Biden was on top of the job whose duties he was elected by the American people to perform. This was done by shielding him from prolonged public exposure, and ensuring as much as possible that everything he said was read by him off a TelePrompter. Even that step failed at times, when he read the verbal delivery instructions as part of the speech:

This lie, this massive lie, that the USA had a fully functional President collapsed at the first unavoidable challenge. Yes, Joe Biden can string two sentences together without prompting. But he couldn’t string many more:

Biden’s aides, people who collectively clearly are the real ones controlling the White House, tried to do damage limitation with, well, lies. They tried to suggest Biden was still suffering jet lag from a flight he took a week previously, that he was recovering from COVID, dog-eating-homework stuff. But the damage was done. The biggest lie had been exposed.

Despite Kamala Harris losing the election, it would seem that the USA has already had its first woman President in the form of First Lady Jill Biden. When Joe and Jill are together in a public meeting, it is obvious who is the one in charge:

It is highly likely that Mrs Biden has been running the USA behind the scenes with the complicity of presidential aides.

Of course there is Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, an amendment drafted to deal with Presidential incapacity, which states:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

It should have been obvious for at least the last two years or longer that Joe Biden was not all there. In the 1980s, people used to mock Ronald Reagan’s verbal gaffes, but these were not taken as evidence of serious impairment, as was also the case with George W Bush’s tenuous relationship with the English language. Reagan’s alleged infirmity was even the subject at the time of this quite excellent sketch on Saturday Night Live (SNL) featuring the late Phil Hartman:

SNL in the past year did not made any such commentary about Biden’s decline before the debate, while they have been piling on Trump for years. A possible reason is that any lampoon of Presidential inability would have been extremely close to the truth. By contrast there was a cameo appearance on SNL in the last week by Kamala Harris, which seems to have not helped her campaign in the slightest. SNL featured a similar cameo by Hillary Clinton in 2016 with a similar outcome against the same opponent.

That Biden was unfit to hold office will have been common knowledge in the White House. Yet no-one seems to have been willing to let Harris exercise her constitutional right to take over. While part of this may have been a desire for a Biden political machine headed by Mrs Biden to hold on to power, this was hardly an endorsement by those at the centre of power in the Democrat Party. If seasoned political operators from her own party preferred a doddery old man visibly in steep decline to the person whose job it is under the US Constitution to take over should that happen, why should the American voter be asked to prefer Harris to Trump?

In fact, media commentators tried to normalise Biden’s visible decline by trying to suggest that Trump was also experiencing cognitive deficiency. This is not a very encouraging argument, as it still raises the question of why the 25th Amendment was not invoked when it could have been.

It gets worse. Had Biden stood and won again against Trump by successfully not exposing his incapacity in the debates, it is highly likely this would have emerged during his second term.

Thus a second term of a Biden presidency could not help but see Harris take over by default when the facts became impossible to deny. This also means that if, in the next 4 years Biden dies, or is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease or any other form of mental infirmity, the Democrats were trying until the middle of the year to foist on the American people a sick old man, but were finally found out when it came to the crunch, despite all the safeguards put in place for the debate. 

The presidency of Joe Biden is the clearest evidence any budding conspiracy theorist needs for the existence of a Deep State. It is inconceivable to believe that Biden was actually in charge of anything and instead was doing as he was told by those in the shadows.

And that is the biggest lie of the 2024 Presidential campaign. The lie that a man that was clearly unfit for office, Joe Biden, was, until the absolute very last moment when scrutiny could not be redirected, capable of completing a second term as President of the United States of America.

All the lies told by Trump over the years shrink into insignificance by comparison. Concealing from the American people for years that their president has been incapable is a scandal of Watergate proportions. Unfortunately it will not be investigated because of media bias. Had Biden been a Republican, that would have been a different matter.

That’s politics. That’s media. That’s unacceptable.

If Joe Biden doesn’t live out the next 4 years, or collapses into seriously impairing infirmity, the American people will need answers. Unfortunately it does seem that the right questions will never be asked by the people whose job it is to ask them.

Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.