On Saturday, Axios reporter Alex Thompson stood before a room full of preening press elites at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner and suggested the media was duped about then-President Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Thompson’s remarks presented Biden’s vacant stares, incoherent mumbling, and frequent confusion as some sort of masterclass in deception.
Thompson’s message was clear: Don’t blame us — we were lied to. But this isn’t just revisionist history, it’s a second-order lie. The press wasn’t fooled — it was complicit.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thomas said to the room of self-congratulatory “journalists.”
“We, myself included, missed a lot of this story,” Thompson said. “Some people trust us less because of it. … We should have done better.”
For a fleeting moment, let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to Thompson and assume the entire corporate press really was fooled by what anyone with eyes could see. If that’s true, they should all resign in disgrace anyway because anyone that oblivious, that incurious, and that easily manipulated is even less competent than we thought.
But of course, Thompson wasn’t speaking in good faith. The media didn’t “miss” the story, nor were they misled. They were well aware of the story and decided to actively suppress and cover it up.
[READ NEXT: WHCA Cared More About Protecting Biden Than Defending The First Amendment]
Thompson himself spent much of 2023 running interference for Biden. When Biden bafflingly tacked “God Save the Queen, man” onto the end of a speech about gun violence, Thompson dismissed it as “possible” sarcasm.
“Biden’s weird phrases are sometimes weaponized by the GOP to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline,” Thompson said. “But Biden has been using these unique phrases for years — even as some of his aides remain confused by their meaning.”
Thompson also dismissed Biden’s profanity-laced tirades against his staff as merely a sign of respect.
“Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn’t yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn’t respect you.”
Notably, as explained by Home Care Assistance Des Moines, “Cognitive decline can cause aging adults to have sudden outbursts of anger. … Your loved one’s anger could also be a sign of dementia.”
In April of 2023, Thompson wrote: “Biden’s age trap: Risks of running at 80.” Thompson wrote that it is “tough for anyone outside [Biden’s] tight bubble to truly appraise the reality of Biden being the oldest president in U.S. history.” He then added that the “reality check” of the situation is that “Biden has remained an active traveler, with more than 20 trips this year — including a long, risky and complicated visit to war-torn Kyiv.”
Thompson later wrote in October of 2023 that it was actually Trump with the “age problem.”
“Trump has his own age problem as he mocks 80-year-old Biden’s fitness,” Thompson headlined his piece.
“Trump, 77, often mocks the 80-year-old Biden as feeble and confused — even as some of Trump’s foes are highlighting the former president’s own gaffes and relatively light campaign schedule,” Thompson wrote, adding that the Biden White House “does release annual updates from the White House physician about his physicals,” despite being “reluctant to discuss details about the president’s health.”
Thompson also tried to dismiss the fact that Biden needed a document with “large print and photos that include his precise path to a podium” before an event by saying that “organizing presidential events … is intensive and detail focused for every commander-in-chief” and that these are “seemingly ordinary practices” that are “receiving fresh scrutiny.”
“Between the lines,” Thompson wrote, “Republicans have tried to highlight videos in which Biden sometimes appears unsure of where to walk on and off stage as a way to suggest he isn’t mentally fit for office.”
Each case was the same: Acknowledge the elephant in the room only long enough to dismiss it.
That’s not journalism, it’s propaganda. And Thompson wasn’t alone in the cover-up. Days before the only 2024 debate between Biden and President Donald Trump, Oliver Darcy wrote for CNN: “Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate.” The “conspiracy theories” in question were that Biden is a “senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government.”
Noah Berlatsky of The Independent wrote in July of 2023: “Let’s fact check Biden’s so-called mental decline” and argued that “questions about the president’s fitness for office aren’t in good faith.”
NBC News’ Matt Dixon, Dasha Burns, and Alex Tabet wrote in October of 2023, “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot,” adding the theory was “centered largely on the thought that Biden is too old and not sharp enough mentally.”
In June of 2023, The Guardian’s Nick Robins-Early tried to downplay the concerns as a “fixture of conservative media” that caught on with the general public. “As Biden … prepares for the 2024 presidential race, it’s likely that his age and mental faculties will be a primary target for conservatives during the campaign.” Robins-Early added: “[M]uch of this narrative has relied on either specious allegations or outright deception.”
The Washington Post’s Toluse Olorunnipa and Adriana Usero wrote in June that “Republicans” were using “cheap fakes” and “misleading videos” to “attack” Biden and try to portray him as a “physically and mentally challenged commander in chief” after Biden had to be led off stage by his wife, Jill Biden.
The Alex Thompsons of the press corps want to memory-hole the smear campaign they waged against anyone who said the quiet part out loud. They want you to forget the editorial boards, the talking heads, and the so-called “fact-checkers” who swore up and down that Biden was just fine.
As White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday, the left-wing media even accused her of “manufacturing deepfake videos, trying to persuade the public into not believing what they saw with their own eyes for many years.” She further stated that the legacy media was involved in “one of the greatest cover-ups and scandals that ever took place in American history.”
The media didn’t miss Biden’s decline, they helped cover it up. And now, in a moment of crisis, they want to position themselves as victims of deceit rather than perpetrators of it.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
