Dec. 19: No, You Weren't Crazy—Biden Was Dead

Israel strikes Houthi ports; U.S. government heads toward shutdown; Fani Willis disqualified at last

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The Big Story

Cynics, skeptics, and conservatives have joked for years about the “Now It Can Be Told” genre of mainstream news stories that come out after any presidential election. These are “revelations”—often deeply and meticulously reported—of some fact or story that has long been obvious but was officially suppressed for as long as it had the potential to hurt Democratic candidates. Once the election cycle is over, the truth can, well, be told.

For instance, the idea that the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than a wet market—apparently common knowledge in the U.S. intelligence community by November 2019 at the latest—was, officially, a xenophobic right-wing conspiracy theory until … the January 2021 issue of New York magazine, in which journalist Nicholson Baker announced that it was true. In February 2021, Time magazine published a celebratory feature on the “conspiracy” between “left-wing activists and business titans” to “fortify” the 2020 election—a Trumpian fever dream only a few months prior. Hunter Biden’s laptop is, in some sense, an exception to the rule in terms of how long the charade went on. Outlets such as The Washington Post didn’t begin acknowledging that the laptop was real until the spring of 2022, nearly a year after it had been authenticated by such disreputable rags as the Washington Examiner and the Daily Mail. But in that case, there was still a sitting Democratic president to protect.

Now we’re getting the 2024 update to “Now It Can Be Told,” in the form of a Wall Street Journal exposé on how Joe Biden’s aides sought to cover up the president’s mental frailty during his four years in office (one of the least convincing cover-ups in history, in our view, but one that nonetheless appears to have fooled vast swathes of the American press). The short version is that a tight inner circle of aides simply kept Biden locked away not only from the public but also from cabinet officials, Democratic lawmakers, and donors, who were forced to interact with aides such as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and former Chief of Staff Ron Klain instead. Indeed, several sources indicated to the Journal that they suspected Biden himself didn’t have his “finger on the pulse” of what was happening in his administration, that his aides briefed him only on what they wanted him to hear, and that the president struggled to grasp even the limited information he was given. Notably, the staff’s efforts to hide the president’s condition commenced almost immediately after he took office; the Journal notes that within “the first few months of his term,” Biden’s aides noticed that the president “became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes,” prompting them to sharply curtail his one-on-one time with “powerful lawmakers and allies.”

The charade, which polling suggested was convincing only about one-quarter of the American public at the best of times, definitively collapsed after the president’s performance in the June 2024 debate—but not before the administration and much of the press had staked its credibility on the idea that Biden was sharp as a tack and that video evidence to the contrary was “misinformation”:

The accessibility problems didn’t improve after Biden was swapped out for Vice President Kamala Harris, however. MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said during an appearance last Friday on So Many Issues with Lukas Thimm that she had to go through “50 people” to try to connect with Harris. “I could write a note that maybe could get to somebody to get somebody; then, through Pony Express and a pigeon, something might end up in a mailbox near them.”

If anything, however, The Wall Street Journal, presumably limited by what administration officials would tell its reporters on the record, undersells the scandal. For a blunter assessment, we can turn to National Security Council intelligence official and Sullivan aide Henry E. Appel, who recently spoke to someone he believed was an attractive young romantic prospect but who was in fact an undercover journalist for O’Keefe Media Group recording him on a hidden camera.

“Joe Biden is, like, dead. He can’t say a sentence,” Appel said. “Everybody recognizes it. I can’t believe it wasn’t a bigger scandal earlier. He’ll be dead within a year.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: David Samuels on the rise and fall of the Obama machine

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The Rest

→“All activity at the ports controlled by the Houthis is paralyzed” after a series of Israeli airstrikes in Hodeida and Sana’a, Yemen, on Wednesday night, according to military sources quoted in The Times of Israel. The Israelis struck more than 30 targets in Yemen, hitting the Houthi capital of Sana’a for the first time since the outbreak of war in October 2023, and targeted “ports and energy infrastructure,” according to a statement from the IDF. During the raid, the warhead from an intercepted Houthi ballistic missile struck an Israeli schoolhouse in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. The building was empty and nobody was hurt.

→Great Moments in “Apartheid”: 57.8% of Arab Israelis believe that the war has created a “shared sense of destiny between Jews and Arabs,” according to a survey from Tel Aviv University reported in The Jerusalem Post. While a plurality of Arab respondents (39.4%) said the war has weakened their “sense of belonging to the state,” the share reporting a “shared sense of destiny” with Jews has actually increased over the course the war—in a survey taken in November 2023, nearly 70% of Israeli Arabs said the conflict had “harmed solidarity between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.”

→The federal government may be heading toward a shutdown, as Donald Trump and his allies, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have mobilized against a more than 1,500-page omnibus spending package that would fund the federal government until mid-March. The bill combines a “continuing resolution” (CR)—which essentially maintains funding at current levels—with thousands of pages of unrelated spending commitments. These range from necessary items, such as hurricane-related disaster relief, to more controversial or partisan ones, such as a one-year lifeline for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, one of the federal agencies at the heart of efforts to suppress domestic political speech under the guise of countering “misinformation.” Plus, as Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) explained in a Wednesday X thread, there’s a host of darkly amusing requests for language changes presumably originating somewhere in the Democratic House caucus, such as officially redefining “out of school youth” as “opportunity youth.”

With the original bill seemingly dead, Politico reported on Thursday afternoon that Republicans had struck a new deal that would combine a CR, a clean farm bill extension, disaster relief, and a raise in the debt limit, which has been a demand of Trump and Vice President Elect J.D. Vance. It’s unclear, however, whether the new deal can make it through Congress.

→On Thursday, a Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from her election interference case against Donald Trump, writing that Willis’ secretive affair with the former special prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade, created an “appearance of impropriety” that could only be remedied by her removal. The Scroll extensively covered the allegations against Willis and Wade in January and February, after defense lawyers in the case filed a motion claiming that the two were in an undisclosed relationship and that Willis had financially benefited by paying exorbitant sums of public money to Wade, who then used that money to pay for cruise tickets, vacations, hotel rooms, and other perks for the couple. The two eventually admitted to the relationship but claimed—contrary to cell-phone records and witness testimony from one of Willis’ former friends—that it did not begin until after Willis hired Wade to work on the case. They also claimed that Willis had reimbursed Wade for the trips and other benefits … but had done so with cash and failed to keep any records of the transactions. In March, a Fulton County judge disqualified Wade but allowed Willis to remain; now she and her office are barred from further work on the case, pending her appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.

→Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence predicted that an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah could trigger an “all-out war” that would kill hundreds if not thousands of Israelis as the terror group’s rocket and drone arrays overwhelmed Israeli air defenses, according to a report in The Times of Israel. Two U.S. officials quoted in the article attempted to push back on the narrative that it was Washington restraining the Israelis from an operation in Lebanon. “Ultimately, [the Israelis] moved forward anyway, but it wasn’t under the assumption that it wouldn’t come at a major cost,” said one official, who attributed the Israelis’ long delay in initiating the operation to their own pessimistic intelligence assessments. “The Israelis just believed that this cost was necessary.” While we know that the White House ordered Netanyahu not to retaliate against Hezbollah in the immediate aftermath of Lebanon, here we’re inclined to give it a slight benefit of the doubt, given that some experts in Tablet’s orbit were similarly concerned about the Hezbollah-Iranian “overmatch” of Israeli defensive capabilities. In the event, Netanyahu went forward with the operation anyway, exposing the U.S.-Israeli assessments as “wildly inaccurate” and decimating the Lebanese terror group within a matter of weeks.

→Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Wednesday that his country cannot be “confined” to its current borders and that “Turkey is bigger than Turkey itself.” While Erdogan’s “irredentism” in Syria has sparked some alarm among the D.C. foreign-policy types—including a recent call from one hawkish think-tanker for the U.S. military to prepare to “kill Turks in Syria”—our own view is that Trump is right to see Turkey’s success over Bashar al-Assad as, on balance, a positive development for the United States. Our point in bringing up Erdoğan’s comment here, though, is to once again highlight the stupidity of Jeffrey Sachs and Tucker Carlson on the Middle East, which was the subject of our Big Story yesterday. Surveying recent developments in Syria, Sachs and Carlson waxed conspiratorial on the secret Zio-Obamaist plot to destabilize Assad (and the rest of the Middle East) in the name of “Greater Israel.” In reality, the Israelis had only an indirect influence on events in Syria, and the actual man behind the operation, Erdoğan, is telling everyone who will listen about his world-historic mission to create a Greater Turkey.

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Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

How Barack Obama built an omnipotent thought-machine, and how it was destroyed

By David Samuels

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.

I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region. A Middle East in which the U.S. actively “balanced” a revisionist anti-American power like Iran against traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed guaranteed to become a more volatile region that would require exactly the kinds of active U.S. military intervention that Obama claimed to want to avoid. Nor did turning over major shipping lanes to Iran and its network of regional terror armies seem like a recipe for the steady flow of oil to global markets that in turn helped ensure the ability of U.S. trading partners in Europe and Asia to continue to buy U.S.-made goods. Seen through the lens of conventional American geopolitics, the Iran deal made little sense.

In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1921 book, as “public opinion.”

Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.

Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.

Even more unusual, and alarming, was what followed Trump’s defeat in 2020. With the Democrats back in power, the new messaging apparatus could now formally include not just social and institutional pressure but the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy, from the Justice Department to the FBI to the SEC. As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent. In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery backed in many cases by the threat of law enforcement or federal action, in what soon became known as a “whole of society” effort.

At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for. These sudden, sometimes overnight, appearances of beliefs, phrases, tics, looked a lot like the mass social contagions of the 1950s—one episode after another of rapid-onset political enlightenment replacing the appearance of dance crazes or Hula-Hoops.

Just as in those commercially fed crazes, there was nothing accidental, mystical or organic about these new thought-viruses. Catchphrases like “defund the police,” “structural racism,” “white privilege,” “children don’t belong in cages,” “assigned gender” or “stop the genocide in Gaza” would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence—or be fed—into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all “decent people” must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide “trainings” for workers—all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.

What mattered here was no longer Lippmann’s version of “public opinion,” rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters—thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders’ design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

Until the fever broke. Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser. In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing Black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history. The totality of Obama’s failure left party donors feeling cheated. Even George Clooney now disavows him. Meanwhile, Trump and his party are in control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.

But reducing the question of what happened to Barack Obama’s new American system to the results of a single election is in fact to trivialize the startling nature and ambition of what he built, as well as the shocking suddenness with which it has all gone up in smoke. The master political strategist of his era didn’t simply back a losing horse. Rather, the entire structure he had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy, for good or ill, has collapsed entirely. At home and abroad, Obama’s grand vision has been decisively rejected by the people whose lives it was intended to reorder. The mystery is how and why neither Obama nor his army of technocratic operatives and retainers understood the fatal flaw in the new system—until it was too late.

Read the rest of this feature here.