Biden's Cognitive Decline, and Refusing to Give RFK Secret Service, w/ Jim Geraghty and Maddy Kearns

I wanted to get to this Maureen Dowd column. You know, Maureen Dowd wrote, she writes for the New York Times and she's an opinion columnist. And it was after the Maureen Dowd column saying my sister, who's been like a fan, it now thinks he's absolutely disgusting because he won't acknowledge his seventh grandchild, that he did it. So she's got some power. He's clearly reading Dowd and affected by her. So here's what she writes. I got to put on my readers. My eyes have been bothering me. So I'm going to read this with my readers, which I kind of like, kind of makes me feel smart. Okay, this is her conclusion about what's wrong here. Staff need to let Biden out of the virtual basement. My God, really? She talks about how he gave a speech on Bidenomics at a community college in Washington suburb on Thursday. He remarked that he wished he could do something, but I'll get in real trouble if I do that. Dude, you're the leader of the free world, she writes. Since he became president, Biden has sharply curved how much he talks to the press, rarely giving interviews. Then she says, when I watch him cut himself short or get cut short by the staff, I get an image of a yellow lab, gamboling smack into an electric fence, gamboling, she writes. When the president stops himself and says, am I giving too long an answer? Or maybe I'll stop there, or I'm going to get in real trouble. He seems nervous that his handlers might yank his choke collar if he rattles on. She goes on and says, the politician who has always relished talking to people, helping, or being around people, seems sort of lonely. Seems sort of lonely, even without the mask. It's as though he's still hidden away. He seems more timid, more cloistered. And when he's more isolated, he seems sadder. She writes that his overprotective staff has gotten into his head. I know he gets frozen on Hunter questions, but he can't hide from them forever either. The president's feelings were no doubt hurt the other day by the Washington Post column by David Ignatius, in which he said he shouldn't run and neither should Kamala Harris. I don't disagree, but I doubt it will make a difference. So by the way, that's her throwing her support behind, he shouldn't run. His staff reinforces the impression that a fragile chief executive by over-managing him, of a fragile chief executive, but over-managing him and white knuckling all his appearances. It's not the staff's fault. And then there's this. I've covered Biden for 35 years. He has always been a babble merchant, prone to exaggeration and telling stories too good to be true, saying inexplicably wacky things. So when he acts like this now, it shouldn't be attributed just to aging. Certainly he has slowed down, but his staff has exacerbated the problem by trying too hard to keep him in check. Americans know who Uncle Joe is, quirks and all, slower and all. Let them decide. Biden needs to start looking like he's in command. His staff is going to have to roll with him and take some risks and stop jerking the reins. Let Joe out of the virtual basement. What do you make of that assessment of this problem and the proposed solution? Well, I think that if anyone has an idea of the full extent of Biden's limitations, it will be his staff. These are the people he's dealing with on a daily basis. These are the people who have to brief him, prepare him for his speeches, his visits. And I think the warning sign isn't he just has really, he just has a bunch of control freaks in the White House. I think the concern is, and we've seen it, and I do think there's a difference between the way Biden's always been kind of gaffe-prone and that way of speaking that betrays some serious cognitive impairment, or even physical impairment. We've seen him fall a number of times, and all of us have experience of elderly relatives, and we know what decline looks like, and this is what it looks like. I think it's a bit rich, really, to blame it on the staff. I mean, maybe we should give her her wish, and the staff should just let go of the reins, and maybe she would then be writing a very different column. I mean, I sort of feel sorry for Biden's speechwriters, because every time he delivers a speech, the focus from commentators becomes on the delivery and not on the substance, and there was actually probably quite a lot to remark on in his UN address. I mean, I wasn't particularly impressed, but there's serious considerations to be had about his foreign policy, what he's doing or not doing about China, how he's responding to the Ukraine war, what his next steps are, and we don't get to discuss any of that, because the conversation continually comes back to his health, and I don't think that's his staff's fault. In the meantime, he does have a challenger. I mean, technically, he has two challengers. Jim Garrity, he's got Marianne Williamson. It's all about the love. Go back and listen to my interview of her to find out if the love extends when we're on the subject of Donald Trump. And then there's RFKJ. Dark evil forces, they're gathering. Donald Trump is from the Black Lodge. He has come through from the Red, you know. What happened to the love, Marianne? Then there's RFKJ, who is still running, and generating a fair amount of buzz for somebody who has been dubbed a conspiracy theorist and a nut and the man to be ignored by virtually everybody in the mainstream. He has asked for Secret Service protection, which, you know, normally I'd be like, why does he need it? Nobody else has it. Nobody on the GOP side has it. Like, why do we have to pay for him? But RFKJ is short for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and there's sadly a long history in his family of assassinations at the presidential or aspiring presidential level. And you could kind of understand the guy being worried, and he says he has received threats, and there was a guy just the other day, we have a video of the man, not the actual attempt, like the attack, I don't know if he actually tried to do the attack, Friday in Los Angeles. Here's the guy. Now, I will say this, RFKJ has got Gavin DeBecker's firm protecting him, and you could do no worse, I mean, no better. You could do no better. I love Gavin DeBecker, but what do you make of his pitch that he deserves Secret Service protection, which this White House has denied? Yeah, well, first of all, regarding Friday's incident, the man in question who was arrested showed up, had two guns, a fake ID as a U.S. Marshal, claimed to be part of Kennedy's security detail and told the staff he needed to see Kennedy immediately. I don't think it's wild or crazy to extrapolate that this person intended harm, and then he was still security detained. The actual security detained him, police arrived, arrested him. Look, by the way, in case your listeners are wondering, the standard issuance of Secret Service protection for candidates is usually right around when they accept the nomination of the major party candidates. The Department of Homeland Security determines who's a major party candidate, but they can adjust that after meeting with congressional leaders, and it's happened in the past. Barack Obama got it very early in the campaign in 2007, major African-American candidate. Unfortunately, there are a lot of racist yahoos in this country who might be tempted to take a shot at him. Very similar story for Herman Cain in the 2012 cycle. Ben Garson, too. So yes, yeah, they can make exceptions, and this seems like an entirely reasonable exception, A, because as you alluded to, this country has a really bad habit of trying to assassinate people named Kennedy. And then the second problem is even if you thought, oh, this is exaggerated, or everybody gets hate mailed, I think the incident on Friday makes it very clear. We should just, I just wanna ask the country, how many armed men do we want to come near someone named Robert F. Kennedy at a campaign event in Los Angeles? Because we're up to two, and I think that's plenty. I think it's entirely reasonable to say, look, Robert F., look, is there an expense involved? Yes, but if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., God forbid, something ever happens to him, can you imagine the backlash of knowing that the Biden administration and leaders in Congress chose not to provide Secret Service protection? Can you imagine how many conspiracy theories that were set off? Can you imagine, like, in the end, one person in the Democratic Party has authority over whether another person in the Democratic Party primary gets Secret Service protection after an incident like this. It looks really bad. And just kind of alluding to what Maddie said earlier in that, just a few moments ago, Joe Biden keeps, like, there's no upside to this. If he could say, yeah, give RFK Jr. protection, I think he'd get some praise for it. I think everybody would say, yes, this is a good idea. Biden keeps finding himself in these bad situations that are entirely of his own making. And regarding his whole aging and energy level in the Maureen Dowd column, look, Biden doesn't do morning events before 10 a.m. People have noticed this. People have written about this. If you want to dispel that, you would start doing events before 10 a.m. He hasn't. The most reasonable conclusion from that is that he can't. 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