When Donald Trump was in the White House, the press would from time to time raise the possibility of removing the president from office under the pretext of the 25th amendment.
The 25th Amendment, states, among other things that, “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.”
Not a murmur from the press about the constitutional amendment, however, hastily drafted and ratified in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, has been forthcoming despite a number of concerning gaffes from President Biden highly suggestive of a rapidly deteriorating mental condition that renders him unfit for the nation’s highest office.
While Joe Biden has struggled with memory recall throughout his presidency, often mixing up persons and places, he is now recalling events that didn’t happen with world leaders who have long been dead.
During a fundraiser on Wednesday at the home of Maureen White, whose husband Steven Rattner manages billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s fortune, Biden referenced the deceased German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
“I showed up … and I sat down and said, ‘America’s back,’ and [French President Emmanuel] Macron looked at me and said, ‘For how long?’ How long? Not a joke,” Biden recalled, according to a pool report.
“Helmut Kohl said, ‘Joe, what would you think if you picked up the phone and picked up the paper tomorrow and learned in the London Times, on the front page, that 1,000 people stormed the Parliament, broke down the doors of the House of Commons and killed 2 bobbies in the process … trying to stop the election of a prime minister?’” he added.
U.S. President Joe Biden also told a nearly identical anecdote in Las Vegas that included long-deceased French leader François Mitterrand, who was in office from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996, while confusing the nations of Germany and France.
“Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterand from Germany — I mean France — looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for?’” Biden retold.
The Democrat-supporting establishment press did its best to cover for the now-perpetually disoriented president — Politico calling the concerning mix-up a mere “slip of the tongue” — but Biden has now repeated the same mistake three times within a week.
The New York Post reports that Biden told the same story at a “stop at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel near Columbus Circle, for an event hosted by Dr. Ramon Tallaj, chairman of the nonprofit SOMOS Community Care and a member of Mayor Eric Adams’s COVID-19 recovery task force,” except this version featured the deceased “Helmut Kohl of Germany.”
While the U.S. corporate press has long abandoned any pretense of objectivity when it comes to the nation’s politics, another historical comparison would be apt to highlight the absurd double standard when it comes to invoking the 25th amendment as a pretext to remove a president from office.
At the end of former President Ronald Reagan’s second term, his aides mulled over the possibility of removing the aging and declining leader from office.
“The president was acting strangely. In the wake of a scandal about his illegal dealings with foreign powers, White House aides felt he was so “inattentive and inept” that a memo sent to the chief of staff raised the prospect of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office,” History.com recalls.
“The president was Ronald Reagan, who was dealing with fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal,” the story added. “His chief of staff ultimately dismissed the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove him, but the incident is one of the few cases in American history in which White House staff seriously suggested it as an option for removing a president from office, based on his ability to perform the job.”
The 25th amendment’s invocation as a pretext to remove a sitting president appears to be highly selective, indeed. It is enough to make one question whether the press cares more about the mental and physical fitness of the sitting president than his party affiliation.
