Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said President Joe Biden repeatedly showed signs of senility during their high-pressure negotiations.
A report from the Wall Street Journal, going off dozens of interviews with lawmakers and political insiders, alleged that Biden repeatedly slips up mentally behind closed doors. The primary record source for the article was McCarthy, a Republican, who elaborated on previous comments he made, claiming that Biden had deteriorated significantly after becoming president.
“I used to meet with him when he was vice president. I’d go to his house,” McCarthy told the outlet. “He’s not the same person.”
McCarthy alleged that Biden’s performance was uneven, appearing sharp at times and less than sharp at others.
“He would ramble,” he said about the spring 2023 meetings to negotiate raising the debt ceiling. “He always had cards. He couldn’t negotiate another way.”
McCarthy said Biden experienced highs and lows over the course of two days in May 2023. After appearing spontaneous and alert in a phone call returning from Japan, he said Biden was forgetful and slow the following day.
“He was going back to all the old stuff that had been done for a long time,” McCarthy said. “He was shocked when I’d say: ‘No, Mr. President. We talked about that meeting months ago. We are done with that.’”
The White House heavily disputed all the accusations in the Wall Street Journal story, particularly casting over McCarthy’s statements.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates pointed out apparent contradictions in McCarthy’s version of events.
“Literally, the sole on-record critic in the entire story is Kevin McCarthy, whose interview contradicts his earlier public and private statements about finding the president sharp in their private meetings,” he said. “What’s more, Democratic members of Congress who refuted Republicans’ lies on the record were left out of the article.”
Bates said the only people willing to “smear” Biden in the story were “political opponents afraid to use their names” and called McCarthy a “proven liar,” pointing to when he denied saying former President Donald Trump bore some responsibility for the Jan. 6 riots despite an audio recording of him saying otherwise.
“President Biden inherited an economy in freefall, fraying alliances, and a spiking violent crime rate, and he turned each around with his experience and judgment, delivering the strongest economic growth in the world, making NATO bigger than ever, and forcing violent crime to a near 50-year low,” he concluded.
Defenders of Biden, such as MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, also pointed out that McCarthy’s comments directly contradicted both his public remarks and private comments reported during the negotiations.
New York Times reporter Katie Rogers relayed her reporting from last year: “Privately, Mr. McCarthy has told allies that he has found Mr. Biden to be mentally sharp in meetings.”
McCarthy wasn’t the only on-record critic, however, with Sen. James Risch (R-ID) sharing a critical impression of his meetings with Biden.
“What you see on TV is what you get,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “These people who keep talking about what a dynamo he is behind closed doors — they need to get him out from behind closed doors because I didn’t see it.”
Other lawmakers, who spoke anonymously, were similarly critical. Some said Biden moved so slowly during a Jan. 17 Cabinet meeting that it took about 10 minutes for the meeting to start. Even then, they claimed that Biden spoke so softly that it was hard to hear him. In the May 2023 meeting discussed by McCarthy, people familiar with the matter said the president spoke with such little enunciation that some had trouble understanding what he was saying.
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Biden’s mental acuity has been one of the main targets for critics of the Biden administration, with polls finding a significant percentage of people showing concern over his age. Biden is 81, and Republican presidential nominee Trump is 77.
The number of press conferences given by Biden is less than half given by Trump at this point in his presidency, and White House visitor logs have shown a shrinking number of people visiting the president.
