Tyler Austin Harper Profile picture
May 16 14 tweets 4 min read Read on X
I wrote about Biden and the new book. As the reporting in "Original Sin" makes clear: this story is bigger than just the 2024 campaign. It was more than a year or two of decline. We need to confront the truth: Joe Biden never should have been president of the United States. 🧵
So far, most discussion of the book has focused on incidents from later in Biden’s term and 2024 campaign: not recognizing Clooney, calling Sullivan “Steve.” But arguably the most damning new reveal came much earlier, during the 2020 campaign, when Biden was not yet president. 2/
The authors report that in 2020, Biden's staffers tried to get videos of him speaking with voters about key issues on Zoom for campaign content. But “he couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” A special team was tasked with editing *hours of footage* into usable *minutes*. 3/ Image
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At least two Democrats who helped produce the films were shocked. They concluded, before Biden ever put his hand on the Bible or sat behind the Resolute Desk, that he wasn’t up to the job. “I didn’t think he could be president,” one of these Democrats explained. In 2020. 4/ Image
People close to Biden tell the authors that his deterioration first became noticeable in 2015. Tapper and Thompson point to tapes from 2017 that suggest “Biden was really struggling” and “his cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.” By 2020, it was getting worse. 5/
Beyond the Zoom disaster, during Biden’s 2020 campaign aides said that “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” In at least one case, they resorted to a teleprompter with scripted questions for an interview. Again: in 2020. 6/
The book goes on to catalogue many disturbing incidents during Biden’s four years. Yes it got worse in 2023/2024, but it was bad from the beginning: cabinet meetings were described as “terrible and at times uncomfortable” from the onset. Biden used notecards. Canned responses. 7/
The picture the authors paint is of a president who was unable to adequately discharge the duties of his office from the very beginning of his term and certainly was unfit by the end of it: by 2024 cabinet secretaries confessed he couldn’t be relied on in an emergency. 8/
Moments throughout the book are stunning, but only one made me gasp. It was not something Biden did, but that one of his aides said about his 2024 run: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” 9/
In other words, the 2024 plan—for this aide at least—was to try to get a mentally unfit president elected for four more years, and then to hide him from the public while unelected staff ran the country. That’s an attempt to undermine democracy and defraud the American public. 10/
As for the DNC, they not only failed to stop this train wreck but greased the tracks: they nixed a century-old primary schedule to put SC first, a strong state for Biden, under the false pretense of “uplifting Black voters.” All to reelect a man the public thought was unfit. 11/
There’s more in my article, much more in the book, but if you find yourself dismissing this because Trump is worse, or downplaying it as “just an old man being old” or “just some bad days,” I do think you should ask yourself: is that really where you want to lower the bar to? 12/
It is not acceptable for a man who has some good days and some bad days to control the nuclear codes. It’s not acceptable for a man who runs US foreign policy to have memory lapses or need teleprompter for basic questions or only be able to work reliably from 10am to 4pm. 13/
If you’re defending Biden against these revelations or downplaying them, you’ve lost the plot. In a sane world, there’d be bipartisan hearings. Regardless, the American public needs to confront the deeper implication: we’ve not had a fit, functional president in nearly a decade.

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More from @Tyler_A_Harper

May 8
It can’t be emphasized enough: wide swaths of the academy have given up re ChatGPT. Colleges have had since 2022 to figure something out and have done less than nothing. Haven’t even tried. Or tried to try. The administrative class has mostly collaborated with the LLM takeover.
Hardly anyone in this country believes in higher ed, especially the institutions themselves which cannot be mustered to do anything in their own defense. Faced with an existential threat, they can’t be bothered to cry, yawn, or even bury their head in the sand, let alone resist.
It would actually be more respectable if they were in denial, but the pervading sentiment is “well, we had a good run.” They don’t even have the dignity of being delusional. It’s shocking. Three years in and how many universities can you point to that have tried anything really?
Read 6 tweets
Mar 31
I spent years tutoring admissions; the ugly reality is that 4.0/1500+ SAT strivers are a dime a dozen. Elite admissions are like a nuclear arms race: a mindless fever to produce more and better products (whether bombs or elite students) knowing you can't possibly use them all.
Higher ed simultaneously stokes this sick arms race (more extracurriculars! another 10 points on the SAT! another sport!) while perpetuating the fantasy that if you work hard you'll earn a spot. Then they turn around and brag "we could fill 6 class sizes of 1500+ SAT applicants!"
A lot of conservatives and moderates fantasize that this is all because of secret affirmative action, but the reality is that *even if* you applied a ruthless purely quantitative criteria to elite admissions you would STILL have too many 4.0/mega SAT kids for the spots available.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 23
The movements/ideas that have been wildly successful in recent years provide a rubric for how to live your life. They offer rules for a chaotic world: wokeness, right-wing wellness, tech optimization culture all do this. That’s what the “we need a left Rogan” discourse misses.🧵
A huge part of the appeal of Rogan and the Rogan Extended Universe is all the motivational stuff and telling you what kind of man to be: watch sports, go to the gym, be curious, eat healthy, etc. It’s quietly about how to live. The show opener is literally “train by day…” 2/
No shade to this person but this tweet was so funny: yes these podcasts are only political some of the time. That’s the point! They create a culture: with ideals, rules, advice, favored hobbies, etc. They are politically successful because they’re about more than politics. 3/ Image
Read 9 tweets
Jan 22
One reason many good-faith left-liberals remain resistant to abandoning DEI is that they incorrectly see DEI as carrying on the legacy of the civil rights movement when in reality DEI has its true historical roots in stupid mid-century New Age therapies and HR compliance culture.
There’s a narrative that true DEI was captured by corporate interests and while this isn’t entirely wrong this argument also obscures the fact that there never was some pure version of DEI that later got corrupted. DEI is directly descended from idiotic mid-century woo and HR BS.
The best book that traces some of this history is Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s “Race Experts,” which shows how what we might now call DEI first bubbled out of experimental mid-century therapies for rich whites and then later went mainstream in a revised form as corporate HR training.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 6, 2024
I wrote about Joe Biden, who deserves much of the blame for Harris’ defeat. Biden likes to say he ran in 2020 to save democracy from Trump. By refusing to relinquish power until it was too late, he handed the country back to him on a silver platter. That will be his legacy. 🧵
During his 2019 run, Biden heavily implied to his advisers and to the public that he would be a one term president. At the time, those closest to him realized that campaigning at age 81 would be out of the question. But in a Shakespearean fit of hubris, Biden changed his mind. 2/
Warning signs were flashing red about Biden 2.0 for years. As early as 2022, Dem voters said they wanted a presidential candidate other than Joe Biden. By February of this year, nearly 90 percent of the public (and 77 percent of Dems) said he was too old to serve another term. 3/
Read 13 tweets
Nov 1, 2024
I wrote about the question on everyone’s mind: are black men really going to vote for Donald Trump? 

White Democrats imagine minorities as half-saints, half-superheroes who they team up with to fight fascism. But the pesky truth is many minority men have Trump-ish beliefs.🧵
For almost ten years, liberal politicians and pundits have spotlighted and relentlessly attacked Donald Trump’s open bigotry. And remarkably, these efforts didn’t just fail. They coincided with black and brown Americans moving in ever greater numbers toward the bigot’s party. 2/
These trends have been particularly acute among black men, whose support for Democratic presidential candidates has steadily decreased since 2012. Over the last year, polls have suggested Trump could get historic levels of support from black men. That wouldn’t be surprising. 3/
Read 12 tweets

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