The previous US president was “mentally incompetent” and ran the country into the ground, Karoline Leavitt has said
Public trust in so-called legacy media has declined sharply due to its “cover-up” of the poor mental and physical state of former US President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said.
Throughout Biden’s time in office, Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly argued that he was unfit for the job – claims which were denied by the Biden administration and many in the media. Biden only faced serious pressure from within the Democratic Party and major campaign donors not to seek reelection after his disastrous debate performance against Trump last June, in which he appeared confused and struggled to finish his sentences. Biden withdrew from the race for the White House a month later, being replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the November election to Trump.
“Millions of Americans watched our mentally incompetent president [Biden] struggle with his day-to-day duties of this office. We watched our country be run into the ground as a result. And nobody in the media wanted to write about that,” Leavitt said during a White House briefing on Monday.
The spokeswoman recalled how during Trump’s campaign her warnings about Biden’s “clear mental incompetence” led to her being “accused by people in this room [journalists] of manufacturing deepfake videos trying to persuade the public into not believing what they saw with their own eyes for many years.”
“I think it is about time the legacy media finally admits that was one of the greatest cover-ups and scandals that ever took place in American history,” she insisted.
Leavitt said that the reluctance to report on Biden’s actual physical and mental condition “certainly did contribute to the decline in the trust that Americans have for the legacy media.”
A poll by Gallup earlier this year suggested that confidence in fair reporting of the news by US media has dropped to its lowest point in five decades. Only 31% of those surveyed said they trust the mainstream media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36% said they do not trust it “at all.”
