About That Video

Something bothered me about the most recent video of Joe, the one where he shuffles from Air Force One to Marine One at the Hagerstown airport en route to his derbate prep at Camp David. As Jesse Watters puts it,

Joe Biden is seen shuffling at the speed of an elderly man with a poor memory as he gingerly makes his way across the tarmac to Camp David.

There is a longer version of the same video, which Fox has edited for this segment. In the longer version, Joe is descending the stairs from Air Force One actually displaying basic physical competence, and as he reaches the tarmac, he returns the salutes of the marines there. But in the segment on the Fox show, he tires visibly as he crosses the 50 yards or so to the helicopter, and by the time he reaches the steps, he's clearly too tired to return the salutes of those marines. This is visible in the Fox edit.

(I checked the protocols for presidents returning military salutes -- civilians in general do not salute, including presidents. Reagan instituted a tradition of presidents returning military salutes, which his successors have tended to follow, although they aren't required to do so. Biden didn't violate any protocol in not returning the salute of the marines at the helicopter, but the fact he did return the salutes of the marines at Air Force One but didn't at the helicopter simply suggests he'd become too tired after his brief walk.)

Another aspect of the scene bothered me. As of this past April,

President Biden has introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine. Instead of walking across the South Lawn to and from Marine One by himself, he's now often surrounded by aides.

. . . Some Biden advisers have told Axios they're concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass — have highlighted his age.

. . . Since the change, some advisers think the images of Biden's walks to and from the helicopter are better, and they expect him to continue to have aides join him.

So this video reverses the policy of the past two months, which had been instituted specifically to avoid the appearance of Joe's shuffling gait. But right on cue, Jesse Waters picked it up and pointed out Joe's shuffling gait, but on top of that, I think there are other grounds for concern that a 50-yard walk across the tarmac is visibly tiring for the big guy. Even more, if you compare Joe's tummy in the photo at the top of yesterday's post here with what we see in the video above, Joe's tummy is perceptibly flatter -- he's losing weight, which confirms my earlier observation that his suits don't fit.

But let's look at the context of how this video reached the public. It clearly was taken by someone standing near the Air Force One stairs, in other words, by someone well inside the Secret Service bubble around the president. That person was authorized to be there, and he or she was visibly holding a camera and filming the whole vignette. The Secret Service and Joe's handlers were clearly on board with this -- I've got to surmise the handlers believed releasing this footage would put Joe in a positive light, showing him active and capable, striding toward his next big challenge.

Or something like that. I briefly toyed with the idea that maybe there was a Secret Service agent who surreptitiously filmed this with the intent of showing the world the real shape the big guy is in, but if such a film got out, given the angle from which it was taken, whoever took it can be clearly identified, and if it were in any way pirated, unauthorized, or manipulated, that person would be committing career suicide. This was meant to be.

So it looks like Joe's handlers thought, contra their own determination two months ago, that showing Joe walking alone to the helicopter would put him in a positive light. It's actually pretty plain that, had he been able to make the walk surrounded by aides and holding Dr Jill's hand as well, his difficulty would have been much more successfully concealed -- and there probably wouldn't have been someone there designated to film the whole process.

But this is a feature of Joe's campaign I've begun to notice -- not only do the handlers seem not even to be trying to conceal Joe's decline, but in effect, they're putting him in situations that can't help but emphasize it. They scheduled him for two highly stressful European trips this month, as well as the Juneteenth celebration and the Hollywood fundraiser, all of which put Joe in circumstances where he had ample opportunities to falter during lengthy and highly publicized appearances, exactly the kind of situation they'd previously said they needed to avoid. As far as I can tell, they seem to have thought this would turn the campaign around!

Now, in a performance apparently calculated to put him in the best possible light going into next Thursday's debate, it shows him not only less than focused and energetic, but displaying new symptoms of poor health -- he faded visibly over the course of a 50-yard walk. Let's keep in mind that the people who cooked this up are also prepping him for the debate, and they're even teasing a big surprise.

In yesterday's post, I noted that the circumstances of the early sustained 2024 campaign are proving exhausting for Joe -- it was entirely his handlers' choice to challenge Trump to the June debate, the earliest ever, and Trump quickly accepted, even granting terms like no live audience and muted microphones that most thought would disadvantage him. But this is clearly forcing Joe into another early and tiring must-win campaign event months earlier than usual.

The problem for Joe is that even legacy media commentators are saying Joe must try to do something to "win" the debate, but nobody is claiming Trump has to do the same. Trump is in fact shaping the battlefield; he's making the point that he's got to debate not just Joe but the CNN moderators as well, while all Joe needs to do to "win" is not fall down. But this is just reinforcing the context that Trump doesn't need to "win", and the media will claim he "lost" no matter what -- except that, win or lose, Joe needs to keep campaigning for another four months and more.

And his handlers set this up. Is Trump just lucky, or is he a lot brighter than we give him credit for?