5 Bonkers Takeaways From Olivia Nuzzi’s Damning Exposé on the ‘Conspiracy’ to ‘Protect Joe Biden’

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

New York Magazine‘s Olivia Nuzzi dropped a bombshell report on the “conspiracy of silence” to prevent the public from learning the truth about President Joe Biden’s decline on the Fourth of July.

“In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office,” wrote Nuzzi. “Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?”

Here are the craziest details from her stunning piece.

CAN’T REMEMBER THE NAMES OF FAMILY FRIENDS

According to Nuzzi, multiple “longtime friends of the Biden family” had found that the president did not remember their names.

The point was punctuated by Nuzzi’s own experience at an event with Biden this spring, when he didn’t recognize her:

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

JILL BIDEN’S ROLE 

The anecdotes including First Lady Jill Biden suggest that she has taken on an important role in helping manage her husband on bad days.

In one instance, the first lady instructed the president to greet and thank a donor by name whom he had only managed to stare “blankly” at and nod his head.

And when Nuzzi greeted her before seeing the president at the event this spring, she returned a pleasant greeting “with a confused, panicked expression,” and then a concerned glance at her husband.

“It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency,” observe Nuzzi. “I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.”

‘SOMETHING NOT OF THIS EARTH’

To describe the president’s in-person appearance as “old” is a massive understatement, per Nuzzi.

“Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth,” she submitted before continuing:

This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call ‘low trust’ — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals.

“Forty percent?” posited one reporter trying to estimate “how dead he appeared to be.”

GOOD DAYS AND BAD DAYS… BACK IN 2020

According to Nuzzi, Biden had good days and bad days even back on the campaign trail in 2020.

“Back then, there were days when Biden appeared sharper than on others. I knew it was a good day when he saw me and winked. On such occasions, he joked and prayed and cried with voters. He stayed to take a photo with every supporter. He might even entertain a question or two from the press. He had color in his face. There was no question he was alive and present,” she recalled. “On bad days, which were unpredictable but reliably occurred during a challenging news cycle, he was less animated. He stared off. He did not make eye contact. He would trip over his words, even if they were programmed in a teleprompter. On such occasions, he was hurried out of the venue quickly and ushered into a waiting SUV.”

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

Nuzzi came to the defense of those on the right who have speculated that the executive branch is not fully under the control of the president himself, observing that there are similarities between the views of Republican voters  and Democratic Party elites on this question.

“Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America,” wrote Nuzzi. “There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.”