President Joe Biden is living a Donald Trump-like life, including being the target of sloppy and unethical reporting.
The media brought out medical experts, Goldwater RuleJust as he did with the man Biden defeated in 2020.
How is that karma?
Since June 27, when Biden collapsed in the first (and likely final) debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, it has been as remarkable as it has been eerie how his reelection effort has mimicked Trump’s first campaign.
The presumptive Democratic nominee faces an internal party battle as rival factions fight over whether to abandon or support him despite his obvious ineptitude. Lawmakers have made lip service statements acknowledging his apparent electoral weaknesses and personal ineptitude for the job, but have stopped short of saying anything that would jeopardize their own political careers.
Party officials, strategists and donors are meeting privately to discuss how to remove Trump from the ticket and what their next steps would be if they were successful. Some are also discussing a last-minute, all-too-clever strategy to replace him at the party’s convention later this summer.
Most damning has been the press, which has been on a full-scale binge since the debate. Insider “scoops” have been everywhere, revealing the grim details of Biden’s years of decline. Taken together, they suggest the president’s decline was a closely guarded secret, thanks to years of machinations involving everyone in the White House.
While many of the reports are credible, some are highly unsubstantiated and often rely on a single anonymous source. Worse yet, the media are asking medical professionals to make expert judgments about men they have never examined themselves.
“Biden has dementia and is delusional,” a Fox News reporter said. Medical Contributor“He has no idea about his health and he has no intention of stepping down.”
Elsewhere in the same network, Marty McCully “If I put a medical student in front of a patient called Joe Biden, and the student came back and reported that the president was cognitively normal and had no diagnosis, the student would fail the exam. This is clearly dementia.”
At NBC News, neurology expert Mark Pitts offered a more blunt assessment, arguing that the president was displaying “classic features of neurodegeneration” and that “it could have been diagnosed from across the mall.”He said.
“His motor symptoms are worsening,” Pitts added. “He has Parkinson’s. That’s a fact. He has brain degeneration. Show me an MRI. Show me that he’s not. Show me your actions, not just your words. He definitely is…[Biden] It is not a difficult case. …Characteristic motor symptoms, slowness, rigidity, Masked Facedysphonia, and if a medical student doesn’t choose Parkinson’s disease on a test, they’ll have to take a make-up class.”
Speaking to Newsmax, neurologist Russell Slusky also claimed Biden suffers from Parkinson’s disease.
Across the sea, mirrorBritish tabloids quoted geriatrician David Jarrett as saying earlier this year that “when I look at pictures of President Biden, I see some signs that he has a bit of Parkinson’s, almost the early stages of Parkinson’s.”
The Daily Mail headline read:I invented America’s gold standard cognitive test, which is why I’m calling on Biden to take it and make the results public..”
To be clear, these experts have not yet researched Biden, and everything they say is based on mere observation. In reality, it is unfounded speculation with an appeal to authority as a nuance.
It’s worthless. It’s also unethical. Sure, these statements may not technically violate the Goldwater Rule, but they certainly do in spirit.
For those who don’t know, this rule was instituted after a survey of psychiatrists found that about 50 percent of respondents thought 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was mentally ill. The survey, subsequently published by Fact magazine, quoted psychiatrists who described Goldwater as a “dangerous lunatic,” a “paranoid,” and a “false image of manhood.” Others also claimed he had an “impulsive nature,” “excessive emotional volatility,” and a “god-like self-image.”
The American Psychiatric Association later called the study “a very public ethical blunder.” Thus was born the Goldwater Rule, which states that psychiatrists should refrain from diagnosing people based solely on observation. (Psychologists have a similar rule.)
The idea behind this rule is that medical professionals have an ethical obligation to avoid inaccurate judgments. The rule is intended to prevent a trusting public from accepting the merely speculative (or political) opinion of a titled expert as fact. It is also intended to prevent the public from being misdiagnosed.
Experts who have never examined Biden and yet confidently assert that he has Parkinson’s disease or dementia (or both) are committing the very thing the Goldwater Rule was meant to prevent: They have not examined Biden. Many of them have probably never even been in the same room as Biden. Thus, they cannot make a professional diagnosis. They simply do not know.
The media and psychiatrists have no doubt Goldwater Rule For Trump, the Goldwater Rule’s spiritual cousin, Biden, has received much the same coverage.
Beckett Adams He’s a Washington-based writer and program director at the National Journalism Center.
