You don’t need a news outlet to tell you what happened—see for yourself. Watch Joe Biden at the end of his talk with Barack Obama at Saturday night’s glitzfest of a fundraiser in Los Angeles and you decide whether you think it’s normal behavior:
Biden freezes before Obama grabs his arm and leads him off stage. Yikes! 😳 pic.twitter.com/nCgAGitoQ6
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 16, 2024
RedState’s Nick Arama summed up her take on the moment:
Yikes is right.
It’s not normal that he just stood there and Obama then had to take his hand to lead him away. How could anyone vote for this? He did something similar at the Juneteenth celebration. But comparing the two as they walked off the stage only accentuated the problem. What’s frightening too, is that the crowd claps, completely ignoring the issues.
Biden Has Another Embarrassing Moment at Fundraiser—Obama Has to Intervene
You might think standing there, appearing to be in a daze, is perfectly normal, but many people do not.
The White House and Barack Obama (some would say they’re the same thing) were quick to respond and tell you that what you saw wasn’t what actually happened.
this did not happen https://t.co/QAPOCla3Sq
— Eric Schultz (@EricSchultz) June 16, 2024
“This did not happen,” Obama senior adviser Eric Shultz posted. Oh, well then what did?
Meanwhile, Biden senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates sent a rather snippy response to the New York Post, the outlet that broke the Hunter “Laptop from Hell” story and was promptly censored for it:
“Fresh off being fact checked by at least 6 mainstream news organizations for lying about President Biden with cheap fakes, Rupert Murdoch’s sad little super pac, the New York Post, is back to disrespecting it’s readers and itself once again by pretending the President taking in an applauding crowd for a few seconds is somehow wrong,” Bates’s statement said. “Their ethical standards could deal with a little unfreezing.”
Notice the use of the term “cheap fakes.” Get used to it, because you’re likely to see a lot more use of it coming out of the Biden White House as we approach the election. A take-off on the term “deep fakes,” which refers to images created or manipulated with AI, its premise is the right-wing media are trying to deceive you by not showing you the full context of a video, manipulating its speed, or cropping it.
They’re specifically moaning about clips disseminated after Biden’s disastrous D-Day performances, where the president wandered off during a photo shoot and just generally seemed off the reservation. The Washington Post is aghast that Republicans would dare publicize Biden’s mental frailty:
In edited videos, Republican officials and allies of former president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to turn Biden’s Normandy visit into a highlight reel of senior moments and missteps, aimed at showing the president as infirm, addled or out of his depth…But an examination of video feeds from the events in Normandy, France, makes clear that the selected clips had been edited to present a particularly damaging — and often misleading — picture.
Again, you be the judge:
The amount of drugs they are going to have to pump into him for the debate is unfathomable. pic.twitter.com/Fzf8Yx7nxO
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) June 13, 2024
They can claim all they want that it’s been cropped, slowed down, whatever, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re watching a man who seems completely out of it half the time.
Trump Roasts Biden’s G7 Breakdowns, As Even the European Press Report on His Senility
They can keep telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing, but I can tell you who is observing it with 20/20 vision: the American people.
