“He is dangerous in word, deed and action.”
“He puts self over country.”
“He loathes the laws we live by.”
So begins Thursday’s New York Times editorial, ominously casting the words against a black-and-white image of an American flag fluttering in the background. The Times renders these indictments with the gravitas of an undertaker, like Moses descending the mountain with stone tablets in hand. In reality, the Times has proven it’s entirely unfit to evaluate the fitness of presidential candidates, whether it’s Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
If the Times were qualified to speak to the American people about presidential fitness, it would not have misled them about Joe Biden’s health less than a week before the first 2024 presidential debate. The Times called videos of Biden’s miscues “deceptive” and “misleading,” parroting the White House’s narrative about “cheap fakes” and denouncing “wild and false claims.”
Earlier this year, in the wake of Robert Hur’s report and Biden’s gaffe-laden rebuttal, the Times editorial board said Biden “must do better.” Despite referencing the president’s age and infirmities, the Times didn’t question Biden’s fitness for the presidency. It should have — if not in 2020, then certainly in February 2024. Instead, the editorial board urged Biden “to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86.”
It was dishonest or delusional for the Times editorial board to have written such a sentence. Everyday citizens with access to far less information than the Times’ editors
