In the hours after last week’s presidential debate, a video clip began circulating showing Jill Biden carefully helping her husband off the stage at the event.
The clip quickly spread across conservative media, alongside an emerging narrative about President Biden’s weak performance: that the debate was a resounding validation of alarm bells that had been ringing for years about his age.
Since long before he took office, right-wing pundits have repeatedly argued that Biden, now 81, was too weak for the job, playing videos of him falling off a bike, stumbling on stage or stumbling over words during speeches.
On the occasions when Biden has exceeded expectations (such as the State of the Union address in March), conservative critics have suggested that he must have been using a performance-enhancing substance or, as former President Donald J. Trump bluntly put it in speeches before last week’s debate, “got high.”
But after Biden’s performance on Thursday, before an audience of 51 million people, concerns about the president’s physical condition became widespread. For many voices in right-wing media, it seemed, it was hard not to gloat.
“The media woke up yesterday,” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said Friday morning. “They couldn’t believe how badly Joe Biden did. Why are they just now realizing that?”
He joined a chorus of conservative commentators who criticized the mainstream press, while vigorously patting themselves on the back, for its coverage of the president. The National Review, for example, ran a series of articles celebrating the fact that it had known all along that Biden had a problem.
“We told you so, fools,” read the headline of a particularly harsh news story published on Friday night.
Indeed, many voices in the right-wing media have seemed so delighted by the sense of vindication that they seem unsure of what to do next.
Some have chosen to take the story even further, turning in recent days to increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories about Biden and his campaign, framed by the notion that his quest for a second term in office was not politics as usual but a fraud on the American public and a sinister case of elder abuse perpetrated by an unwitting figurehead.
“This has certainly stoked the fever swamp,” said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. “No matter what happens, the conspiracy theorists still think there’s a grand wizard behind the scenes controlling politics.”
In a series of posts on the social media site X on Monday, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed to have insider knowledge that Democratic elites had secretly conspired against Biden, alleging that former President Barack Obama’s public statement of support for the president was “fake.”
Critic and novelist Walter Kirn, who hosted a debate viewing party with journalist Matt Taibbi that was watched by 82,000 people, argued that the president was the target of a deep state “mob attack” calculated to embarrass him on national television and force him out of the race against his own wishes.
Others, including influential podcast host Ben Shapiro, singled out Biden, describing her as a modern-day, power-crazed Lady MacBeth who “insists that her dementia-afflicted husband stay in the race.”
And conservative radio host Mark Levin joined a chorus of critics comparing Biden unfavorably to President Woodrow Wilson’s wife, who secretly assumed many executive duties after her husband suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919. “Jill Biden is the Edith Wilson of our generation,” Levin said.
In the days after the debate, it was hard to find conservative voices who refrained from attacking, something Barrett Marson, a Republican campaign strategist, said they would be well advised to do given the very public crisis facing Democrats.
“The debate doesn’t need hype,” Marson said. “The best thing to do is just stand back and watch the chaos unfold.”
Still, there were a handful of conservative voices in the media willing to temper their glee, if only momentarily.
“I woke up feeling sad,” Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren posted on X on Friday morning. “I did not enjoy watching an old man struggle for 90 minutes while the entire world watched.”
