On another discussion board I frequent, I saw a discussion about whether or not Joe Biden is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The evidence they point to is various public appearances during which he seems to exhibit brief episodes of verbal confusion. As one might expect, the people espousing this position in that discussion all skew conservative. OTOH, die-hard Biden supporters will be comparably reluctant to acknowledge a problem until it’s so bad that it can’t be glossed over…so maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle?
So what do people here think? Based on your personal experience with dementia among friends/family, or your professional medical training, what is your armchair/remote diagnosis/prognosis of Biden’s mental fitness for continued service as POTUS?
I think there are medical personnel that take care of the President that could actually make such a diagnosis and any and all chatter online is useless conjecture or a smear job.
I’ve had relatives with dementia. Listening to Biden is nothing like listening to someone with dementia, especially since Biden is a stutterer, as Kenobi points out.
Yeah, have had a number of interactions with people who had actual dementia, misspeaking and stuttering aren’t real symptoms that you can use to diagnose dementia, and people 20 years old can do both. Short term and long term memory both decline with age, but “forgetfulness” also occurs at any age, and people have different baselines of normal short and long term memory such that there’s certainly healthy 65 year olds with better short term memory than some healthy 25 year olds.
Biden at almost 80 has almost certainly experienced what I would call a mild cognitive decline, because we kind of know that by age 65 or so everyone has suffered a mild cognitive decline. But the word mild is important, there’s a reason for example that a large percentage of research scientists who win Nobel Prizes do their seminal work in their 30s or early 40s, but lots of them continue to make contributions to their field into their 80s–and if you can do heavy scientific research into your 80s with typical mild cognitive decline from aging, you’re probably good to do about anything.
Dementia is different. You cannot and should not have any number of responsibilities (least of all the Presidency) with dementia. Dementia also has some more serious early symptoms:
-Suddenly not able to remember the name of familiar items (for example, forgetting that a couch is called a couch)
-Show signs of personality change
-Suddenly lose interest in activities you had previously enjoyed, e.x. an avid gardener suddenly having no interest in gardening
-Get lost in a very familiar area, i.e. driving to the grocery store you’ve gone to for 30 years to buy groceries, and getting lost on the way home
Many times a person with early dementia will be fine much of the time, and a sudden episode like those above will be noticeable primarily to family, which will prompt their first doctor visits over it. Nothing in Biden’s speeches or public appearances has been such that it’s an obvious sign he has dementia, nor would it necessarily prove he doesn’t. But that’s why the President is supposed to be looked at by physicians and other people who monitor his executive function regularly, and typically Presidents have families who would also know if something was wrong.
If he had it and it was medically diagnosed the information would leak–that is how Washington works.
I think Joe has as many Senior moments as many people in their 70s, and people notice them because of the public nature of his job. OP: do you agree that someone regularly having Senior moments does not mean they have any kind of dementia?
I work with people with dementia every day, from the earliest stages to end stage. I’ve never met Biden personally, but he does not strike me as someone who has dementia. FWIW neither does Trump.
The previous occupant of the White House was also a man in his 70s, who also sometimes displayed signs of aging – he’d slur his words during speeches, he occasionally had to use both hands to drink from a water bottle, and sometimes walked unsteadily. Some opponents insisted that these were signs he was unfit for the office, while supporters said “it’s nothing, he’s fine.” Either way, it’s armchair quarterbacking.
To me, the CEC pushing this unfounded garbage is the same thing they did when they declared Hillary had some terminal neurological disease and Obama had Muslims hiding in every corner.
Right, I saw a lot of signs from Trump that he might be an imbecile, but nothing that was ever a clear sign of dementia to me. It’s also notoriously difficult to actually diagnose something like that purely from limited television appearances.
Some people want Biden to have dementia. Serves him right. Stole the election. Nothing he does can be legally binding because he’s got dementia, etc. etc. And it seems to me a subgroup also thinks if he does… it invalidates his win and puts Trump back in.
I’m amazed that this question is not more widely viewed as a pure smear job, straight out of Goebbel’s book: always accuse one’s enemies of that which oneself is most guilty.
Oh, goodie. Tell me, Sam, do you deny that Reagan actually suffered from, and was diagnosed with, some form of dementia by his own doctors? I’ll be delighted to read your spin on this simple yes-or-no question.
I don’t remember jokes about Reagan being a little off until maybe the last two years of his Presidency, as someone who still remembers the Reagan years well.
This skit (14) Ronald Reagan Press Conference - Saturday Night Live - YouTube which aired in late 1986 was somewhat typical of jokes being made about Reagan at the time. I think most people just assumed Reagan was old and were joking about it though, I don’t remember anything like the serious claims of dementia that were made against Trump–people actually were doing think pieces in major outlets and on cable news saying Trump needed to get tested for dementia–and then he actually took the Montreal test. I’m not saying no one ever uttered the words “Reagan has dementia”, I’m sure someone did. But until the last 2 years of his Presidency, Reagan might get made fun of for being old (since he was the oldest President we’d ever had), but I don’t remember there being a broad feeling he was infirm or “too old.” The last two years of his Presidency I remember it taking a bit of a nastier turn on age based jokes, but frankly some of that was because his diction and public appearances were showing a clear decline in ability to speak and etc. Even then, most people I ever heard talk about it seriously just viewed it as Ronnie was getting old, I don’t remember any mainstream, serious/credible movement to have Reagan diagnosed as having dementia and being unfit for office. When he came out as suffering from Alzheimer’s in the early 1990s, a lot of people suddenly retconned it as being obvious he had dementia during his Presidency, which I don’t think was true.
I see no evidence of dementia. I used to volunteer at a nursing home with people who had dementia. Some had it worse than others but it becomes fairly obvious that someone has that medical condition. While any president is sheltered, he wouldn’t be able to give a lengthy speech, even from a teleprompter, with that condition.
On political motivations: I saw a question on Quora a short while back, asking if Biden has to step down, will Trump be made President. They sounded hopeful, but of course they were wrong. If Biden really had dementia, he would step down and we would have Kamala Harris as president. If Republicans are hopeful that Biden has dementia, they’ll have someone they like even less in the Oval Office.