The Abyss Stares Back at Joe Biden

                                              Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York Times

It’s a familiar theme: the tragic hero who gains power to vanquish some evil and in doing so commits, or becomes, the evil he intended to vanquish. The Huey Long-like character of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” comes to mind, as does the figure of Brutus in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”

And so, increasingly, does President Biden. The man elected to banish his self-deluded, deceptive, disrespected and destructive predecessor increasingly embodies those vices himself.

So much is becoming clear in recent reporting about the president’s mental state. “Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head,” Olivia Nuzzi reported last week for New York magazine. “The first lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say ‘hello’ to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him.”

There’s plenty more like this, including in The Wall Street Journal and The Times. “Asked if one could imagine putting Mr. Biden into the same room with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia today, a former U.S. official” — who had helped prepare Biden for a recent trip to Europe — “went silent for a while, then said, ‘I just don’t know,’” The Times reported. “A former senior European official answered the same question by saying flatly, ‘No.’”

We have gone from Howard Baker’s famous question about Richard Nixon — “What did the president know and when did he know it?” — to something much more pathetic: What does the president know and does he even remember it?

All this would be more sympathy-inducing if the president and his advisers weren’t engaged in what, to all outward appearances, looks to be an aggressive cover-up about the speed and extent of his decline. A phalanx of administration officials constantly insists that the president is sharp, spry, on top of it, slowed by age but well oiled with wisdom. The president himself declared “my memory is fine” in an angry rebuttal in February to the report of Robert Hur, the special counsel, which described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

But the clearer it becomes that Hur was right, the more offensive the denials feel — not only because they are so transparently untrue but also because they seem so obviously self-interested. If, as Axios reported, the president is “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., then who are the Edith Wilsons running the country the other 18 hours of the day?

This is worse than reckless. We still elect a president, not a cabinet, and the president alone holds the vast constitutional powers of war, peace, justice and administration. If the president’s secretaries, confidantes and family members think they are helping him or the country by assuming an ever-increasing share of his decision-making, they aren’t. They are usurping his authority, deceiving the nation and enticing our enemies into mischief or miscalculation.

They are also feeding the rampant cynicism that in turn feeds MAGA nation. The embarrassment of Biden’s debate performance last month isn’t simply that it confirmed everything that Fox News gleefully alleged and MSNBC pompously denied about the president’s mental state. It’s that it perfectly fit the narrative of a deep state that protects its own, that calls its critics liars while lying all the time, that can barely hold it together but maintains a very high opinion of itself.

“Not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world,” Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview last week. He made this grandiose — one might say Trumpian — claim in nearly the same breath as he flatly refused to take a simple cognitive test.

Now the president is compounding the damage with his insistence that he’ll be the Democratic nominee. The sheer narcissism that goes with putting personal ambition before the interests of your party or country is supposed to be Donald Trump’s thing. At least the former president really does have the support of his party and, to judge by polls, a plurality of voters. Biden’s own ambitions seem to rest on data that, increasingly, are visible only to him.

I have been writing for several years now that Biden has a personal interest and a moral obligation to stick to his early implicit pledge to be a one-term president, and that the evidence of his mental decline is unmistakable, and that an administration that tries to cover up the obvious is writing its own epitaph. Given the stakes in this election, I honestly wish I’d been proved wrong. For now, the president should heed the warning of a philosopher who would have seen our moment clearly:

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil.” “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”