Donald Trump is ignoring the courts, dismantling America’s superiority in biomedical research, illegally firing federal workers, and using the office of the presidency to enrich himself. So what is the media most focused on right now?

Joe Biden’s age.

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In a replay of the Hillary Clinton email saga, mainstream reporters are having a field day replaying the events of last year. The narrative has been helped mightily by a new book by CNN’s Jake Trapper and Axios‘ Scott Thompson, which claims that Biden was in such severe physical and mental decline that staff restricted urgent business to between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. when Biden would be sharpest and even considered having him use a wheelchair.

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No wonder the New York Times‘ review of the book proclaimed it “A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle.”

The Trump White House, smelling blood in the water, took the book’s release as the perfect time to release a four-minute audio clip of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who had been looking into whether Biden should be charged with a crime for mishandling classified documents after he left the Obama administration. Hur had previously described Biden as an old man with a bad memory, and the clip pretty much confirms as much.

Anyone who watched the first presidential debate would have figured that out on their own. However, the media have spilled endless pixels about what this all means for the Democrats, or as the Times puts it, “as Democrats are grappling with new revelations about Mr. Biden’s health while in office.” (Unmentioned in that story was Trump’s own potentially felonious mishandling of classified documents.)

Biden’s announcement that he has metastatic prostate cancer only fueled the media frenzy. Some Republicans insinuated that he was sick while he was in office and that it was just a ploy for sympathy. (Trump offers no details of his checkups.) The diagnosis only added to the speculation about the depth of a cover-up.

Let’s be clear: Biden’s willingness to put his own vanity above the needs of the party (let alone the nation) is responsible for Trump’s success. Whether another Democratic candidate could have beaten Trump is open to debate. The lingering issues about inflation would have made a campaign difficult for any Democrat following Biden. But Biden’s obstinacy left Kamala Harris with just a few months to mount a campaign, which put her at a disadvantage from the get-go.

That’s history. Democrats who are agonizing over (or, if you prefer, “grappling”) Biden’s decline in office are also the same Democrats who aren’t fighting tooth and nail against Trump. At this point, the problem for Democrats isn’t what happened in 2024. It’s their often feckless response to what’s happening right now. The more Democrats publicly fret about Biden, the less time they spend blasting Trump.

From an inside-the-Beltway perspective, the Biden saga is catnip to the pundit class. Thompson took his fellow reporters to task at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month because “we missed a lot of this story.” It sure is easier to focus on one topic—Biden’s age—than deal with the Trump administration’s flood-the-zone strategy. A plane from Qatar, crypto investors, illegal firings, immigrants condemned to foreign prisons—that’s just too many things to focus on.

None of this is to say that the story of Biden’s decline isn’t newsworthy. It is. But is it really more newsworthy than the ongoing Constitutional crisis that Trump is precipitating? If you read the mainstream media, the answer is yes. And if you are wondering why people don’t have a good sense of how bad things are under Trump, you don’t have to look any further than the home pages to see how skewed the media’s sense is of what is truly important.

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