COOPER: Was it The Donald that drove Joe over the edge?

Not since the disgraceful performance of President Clinton concerning Monica Lewinsky a generation ago have so many of my American friends, both Democrat and Republican, been so ashamed of the major political institutions of their country.Leading the ticket of disappointment is Joe Biden. In 2020 Biden promised his supporters to be a one-term “caretaker” president. He would restore normality to the White House after the Trump interlude. He would then give his blessing to the next generation of Democrats.So, what happened? Why is he running today? Especially given the context of polling that for months has suggested that Biden was the most likely of all Democrats to be defeated by Trump.According to the Dems, Biden chose, for the good of the country, to sacrifice his twilight years to save democracy in America. As he put it in his recent debate with Trump, it was in 2017, following an alleged white supremacy march in Charlottesville Virginia, that he decided to offer his 2020 candidacy. In his own words: “singing the same antisemitic bile they sang when — back in Germany. And what did — and the young woman got killed. I spoke to the mother. And she — they asked him, they said, what —what do you think those people, the people who — the one who — the ones who tried to stop it and the ones who said, I think there’s fine people on both sides.”Whatever Biden thought he was saying, it is probably fair to observe that Biden did not decide to run in 2020 to combat antisemitism. That makes his appearance in 2024 even more of a puzzle.The initial explanation is psychological. Just as Trudeau’s critics have said he will stay on as Liberal leader because returning to teaching French or snowboarding to teenage girls had lost its charm, so Biden-watchers said that another four years of being very important, with a huge private jet and being fawned on by celebrities and celebrity journalists beats shuffling off into retirement and watching the sun go down.News reports have maintained that four-time Vogue cover-girl Jill Biden —that’s Dr. Jill Biden to you, pal — especially enjoys the perks of first lady-dom.And then there are the travails of First Son, Hunter. Miranda Devine, writing in the New York Post a couple of days ago made an interesting observation, that Hunter, not Jill, is the main force ensuring Joe does not retire.Hunter apparently has been helping with speechwriting and attending meetings with senior presidential aides. He has become a proxy commander-in-chief and gatekeeper limiting access to the official one. The chairman of the House Intel Committee, Mike Turner (R-Ohio) demanded to know if Hunter was receiving classified briefings. Interesting question.Devine also pointed out that, even if Hunter is a crackhead, he is an intelligent, ruthless, manipulative one. He will ensure he gets what he wants, which makes him a formidable opponent to those Dems who think they can get Joe to abdicate. Hunter’s future depends on his dad’s pardon, which of course Joe said he would never provide. At least, not yet.So, at the top we have a first family that reminds one of some of the unforgettable portraits from Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars regarding corruption during the Roman Empire.Right behind the Biden family are the legacy media. For years social media and independent sources have brimmed with clips of Joe displaying his problems to the world. He freezes. He trips. He gapes, slack jawed. He wanders away off stage. He utters gibberish. For years normal people knew that, for long periods of time there was nobody home. Joe is deeply senile.The only major media outlet that ever hinted at his problems was Fox. And, of course, they were marginalized by all the rest as “right-wing” not to say, “far right.”In fact, it is more accurate to say that Fox, unlike the others, distinguished between news reporting and opinion, and their opinion journalists included conservatives. In fact, public confidence in the legacy media has been in decline since the 1990s. Years ago Lydia Miljan and I wrote a book about the liberal bias of mainstream journalists. We discussed the Canadian variant, but really Canada just followed the Americans.Consider how the American legacy media prepped for the Biden-Trump debate on June 27. There was their coverage of the Russian hoax, of the riots and Black Lives Matter, of experts and the COVID-19 event, and the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” called Russian disinformation by complaisant “intelligence” officials.Then, suddenly, a day after the debate it was clear that Biden was dotty.Apparently, it wasn’t clear the day before. The June 26 New York Times ran a front-page story criticizing the posting of unflattering videos of Biden. They distorted the truth. A former Congressman claimed that if you looked at those videos “you’re going to walk away thinking there’s something wrong, like something’s going on.” But when people see the debate, the Times prophesied, “they’re going to be pleasantly surprised” because “the president is in a lot hardier shape then they’ve been told.”A couple of weeks earlier on June 11, the Washington Post similarly denounced “misleading” videos showing Biden as “addled.” More right-wing “politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”This was nonsense, and it precipitated a change from a posture of declining confidence in the media to a crisis of legitimacy.The first response was that Biden had a bad night. A few days later Joe agreed. But it wasn’t a bad night and everybody, including the media, knew it.As Ben Shapiro said in The Spectator, Biden’s performance was an existential threat to the media. They had defended Biden by lying about him. Once he was onstage the lies were obvious so they had no option but to keep on lying. They seriously asked: who knew he was senile? He looked OK yesterday! This is appalling! Biden must go! What happened? Well, nothing happened to Joe, which is what made the legacy media complicit in the Biden corruption. Worse, there is no fixing it. Hence the existential crisis.A few questions remain unanswered: why did Joe change his mind and decide to run again when he, more than anyone, knew he was unfit? And why did the legacy media persist in lying and covering things up when they knew — as Joe would say — it was all malarkey?The most obvious answer is hubris or its psychological version, narcissism, that has led almost inevitably to nemesis. This is correct so far as it goes, but it does not quite go far enough. There is also the challenge to conventions represented by Donald J. Trump. His remarkable ability to induce TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome —in his opponents has contributed in a major way to their increasingly pathological frenzy.