Just 120 days ago, Joe Biden had a full cognitive work-up which showed no abnormal results. Major media had access to this report beginning on March 1 and pretended it did not. Prior to leaving for a long overseas trip in June, President Biden exhibited no cognitive behavior that is unusual for his age. Major media had confirmed this within hours or (at most) days of the Atlanta debate, and either failed to report it, buried it in longer articles intended to suggest something very different about the President of the United States, or else—sadly, this is what happened with most media outlets—continued to report the opposite of the truth to mislead readers.

During his trip overseas, President Biden was so committed to working hard for America that he ignored staffers’ advice about resting, undertook a schedule that major media now confirms would be deemed both physically and mentally “grueling” for a man half his age, and yet still exercised daily and came home to America to continue to work long hours. This wholly elective lack of necessary self-care, which to his credit Joe Biden has only blamed himself for since Atlanta, led to him (a) getting a bad cold, (b) needing to take daily afternoon naps, and (c) making several more gaffes than usual in the days immediately preceding Atlanta. His transient ill health was known to his team before the debate, but there was also, it now appears, a universal presumption—almost surely correct—that if it had tried to move the debate or to pre-but any poor performance with a revelation that the president was briefly in a bout of bad health very much of his own making, major media would have skewered him mercilessly. So Team Biden rolled the dice.

None of this impacted anything national security-related, either before or after the debate, according to over a dozen sources. In other words, the fear Americans are most likely to have about the cognitive abilities of any U.S. president or candidate for that job are unfounded—as least as to Joe Biden. As to Donald Trump, as we will see below, the fears are very much founded, and have nothing to do with a known cause like an overseas trip during which the man ignored staffers and worked far too hard and too long for a man of any age. Since he got over his cold and got some rest, Joe Biden has been just fine. And that is according to everyone who works with him who’s spoken to major media about it. Moreover, major media has confirmed from countless sources that prior to going overseas in June the president was sharp as a tack, including and perhaps especially in national security briefings and national emergencies—making claims of a longstanding cover-up by MAGA voters and far-right ideologues laughable.

In contrast, Donald Trump has been in demonstrated cognitive decline over the last year, and there is no known explanation for it; indeed, the campaign has not even tried to explain it. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Trump and his team, in conjunction with major media, have worked to treat any discussion of this subject as verboten, even though it’s been all over independent media outlets—with video, audio, medical analyses, and more—for months if not more. At the time major media began harping on President Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, progressive dissatisfaction with the lack of coverage of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline had reached a fever pitch. The only way for major media to resolve the situation in its favor was to turn a one-night situation whose causes and implications it quickly understood to be (respectively) transient and virtually non-existent into a bigger story that would at once plump ratings, virtue-signal even-handedness, and put progressive critics back on their heels. It also would punish an administration major media feels angst toward because it’s been far worse for ratings and for subscription models than its incompetent, corrupt, unprofessional predecessor.