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How Republican Operatives Fabricate Biden Gaffes

The president has a rich history of miscues. But GOP operatives have used misleading viral videos to imply that he is in mental decline.

By Yair Rosenberg
President Joe Biden
Getty

Long before he became president, Joe Biden was known as a “gaffe machine.” His verbal stumbles, exacerbated by a stutter he has fought since childhood, were so frequent that when he was tapped as Barack Obama’s vice president in 2008, Slate felt compelled to explain “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” Their conclusion was that Biden’s missteps were so common that they no longer had much impact: “When Obama picked Biden, some Democrats suggested that Biden’s unpredictable tongue would become a distraction. Others criticized him as being too ‘safe.’ They’re both right. He is a gaffe machine—but he’s harmless.” This was why I argued in 2019 that Donald Trump was the perfect match-up for Biden: the latter’s noted propensity for gaffes would pale in comparison to his competition.

Joe Biden is also—I hope you are sitting down for this—old. Like most people his age, he is not as spry as he was when he was younger. He speaks and moves a little slower. He has more trouble controlling his stutter than he once did. At the same time, he is more adaptable and agile at 79 than most, as he demonstrated this past week in Israel during an impromptu moment with two Holocaust survivors:

In other words, Joe Biden is a man long prone to verbal foibles who is also older than he once was, and his conduct as president has reflected that. This is an accurate description of the mundane reality. But it is not interesting or politically useful—which is why the Republican Party and its ideological ecosystem have decided to invent a different Biden. This Biden is not simply an older version of his past self, for better and worse, but instead is an incapacitated vegetable who has no idea what is going on around him. (What this says about Donald Trump, who couldn’t beat this alleged invalid, is never elaborated.)

While covering President Biden’s visit to Israel this past week, I got a front-row seat to how this works. As we’ve discussed previously in this newsletter, one of the fastest ways that falsehoods spread on social media is through selectively edited or misrepresented viral videos. Whether it’s an interview with an athlete or a clip of a Black Lives Matter protest, these videos mislead many into thinking they saw or heard something that never happened. This is how utterly uninteresting moments from Biden’s Israel trip were turned into evidence of his purported mental meltdown.

Take this claim from the official messaging account of the Republican National Committee:

The included video clip does show Biden asking “What am I doing now?” But there are some red flags. It is just nine seconds long, and no context is provided. It turns out there is a good reason the video was truncated: The full version provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for Biden’s question. And you don’t have to take my word for it; you can watch it for yourself. The Israelis livestreamed the entire welcoming ceremony when Biden landed, and the relevant portion appears at around 23:17:


So what happened? After departing Air Force One, Biden walked down a long line of dignitaries and officials, exchanging fist bumps and greetings. When he arrived at the end of this receiving line, he asked where exactly he should be standing for a photo op with Israel’s president and prime minister: “What am I doing now?” They showed him where to go, and that’s how we got dramatic shots like this one:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, and outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stand for the national anthems at Ben Gurion Airport on July 13, 2022. (Getty)

The RNC clip comes directly from the Israeli livestream. In other words, whoever made it likely knew that Biden had said something entirely innocuous, and chose to misrepresent what happened. Displaying remarkable contempt for its audience, the RNC posted the deceptively edited video and relied on its followers being too credulous to look up the original and discover the truth. Sadly, it worked, as the clip spread like wildfire across conservative social media:

This wasn’t the only banal incident from the visit that Republican operatives disingenuously recast. On Biden’s second day in Israel, he was awarded the country’s presidential medal of honor. At that event, Biden gave a speech, after which he walked from the podium to his right and gestured to two chairs on stage, pointing to one and asking Israel’s president which he should sit in. If you are already bored, you should be. But on official Republican Twitter channels, this moment became something far more exciting: Biden, it was claimed, tried to shake hands with someone who wasn’t there.

Steve Guest is special communications advisor for Senator Ted Cruz. The video was originally posted by the RNC.

Ironically, the truth is evident in the RNC’s own embedded video. If you watch the full clip, Biden is gesturing to the chairs, not to an invisible person. The only reason it looks momentarily like he isn’t is because the chairs are initially outside the video’s frame. He can see them, but the viewer can’t. Once again, it was not Biden who was at odds with reality, but the RNC. Once again, the RNC relied on the ignorance of its audience in order to mislead them about the president’s capacity. And once again, many were deceived:

Obviously, these misrepresentations are an injustice to Biden and Democrats. But they also harm conservatives and Republicans. Here’s why.

These people rely on conservative media to explain the world to them. Its claims shape the choices they make and the strategy they use to persuade others of their views. By misinforming its own voters with easily debunked videos, the RNC is ensuring that its arguments will not stand up to reality or challenge. Back during the 2020 Democratic primary, supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders tried to paint Biden as a mental patient, right before he ran the table in the primary and beat Sanders in a one-on-one debate. Turning one’s own political base into conspiracy theorists may gain retweets from inside one’s bubble in the short term, but it portends disillusionment and failure in the long term.


As promised, here is the conclusion of my interview with historian Walter Russell Mead. If you missed the first part of our conversation about Israel, the “Zionist lobby,” and the non-Jewish roots of support for the Jewish state, be sure to read it here.

Rosenberg: You’ve been working on this book for over 10 years. It was the first thing that we talked about when we first met a decade ago. What was something that most surprised you on this very long intellectual journey that you didn’t know walking in?

Mead: For me, it was kind of one surprise after another. A lot of the book toward the end is looking at why Israel starts out as a left-wing cause in America, whereas now, a lot of people would say it’s a right-wing cause. How did that happen? And why? What is the role that Israel has played on the American right? What I found is that it’s not so much that the American right arbitrarily picked up the cause of Israel and decided to run with it. But rather, in some ways, the relationship with Israel is less the creation of conservative American evangelicals than it is that evangelicalism to some degree owes a lot of its strength to the rise of Israel. By the way, that is true not just in the U.S., but all over the world—where the rise of Israel is seen by a lot of people as a vindication of biblical prophecies, and felt by people to prove the truth of Christianity.

In the medieval times, the survival of the Jews was seen as undercutting the credibility of Christianity. If Jesus’s own people didn’t believe it, how could this religion possibly be true? But in the atmosphere of the last 50 to 70 years, this has flipped. We seem to be living almost in an age of apocalypse—climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, the singularity, who knows what else. In this uncertainty, the sense that something biblical and ancient that was predicted 2,500 years ago is happening gives people a sense that there is a God who created the world and who guides history. And so for a lot of people in America who are not Jewish, and not even evangelical or fundamentalist Christian, the existence of Israel is a sign of God working in the world, and that we’re not in this mess on our own. We should never underestimate that, in understanding the emotional connection between many Americans and the state of Israel.

Rosenberg: My last question brings us back to Vulcans and Jews in space. A long time ago, you recommended that I read a short story called “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi,” which is an incredible science-fiction satire and a magisterial meditation on Jewish identity. It’s also a tricky story to understand, even if you’re pretty steeped in Jewish ideas and Jewish history. Unless I’ve been gravely misinformed, you are not Jewish. Yet you know more about Jews than most Jews. How did that happen? And how can we go about cultivating curiosity about communities that are not our own?

Mead: Those are really good questions. Part of my interest began when I was in the seventh grade. I had a wonderful English teacher named Bruce Cooper, who was one of just a handful of Jews in our town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was conscripted to help him study for his master’s oral exam, which was an amazing crash course in English literature. Bruce was such a great teacher, and that encounter left me with very friendly feelings. But there’s also a family connection.

My grandfather, for whom I’m named—Walter Russell Mead, the first—was working his way through medical school and didn’t really have any money. So in New York, he got a job as the tutor to the Warburg family and their kids. Actually, the house he lived in is now the Jewish Museum of New York, so my grandfather lived in the Jewish Museum. At the time, he noticed that Mr. Warburg was a very generous man, and found out that he tithed his income. My grandfather at the time had very little money, but decided that if Warburg could give all that money, he could tithe his little bit, and for the rest of his life, that was his goal. My father learned that from my grandfather, and that informed his approach, and it’s been a real guidepost for me as well.

As I got older and was interested in studying European history and culture, so many of the people who had written interesting things, whether it was Karl Marx or many of the literary critics of our time like Lionel Trilling, were Jewish. Then I lived in New York for many years, and naturally enough, a lot of my friends were Jewish. And I got curious. I wondered, What is it like to be a member of a minority that has no rational expectation of ever being anything but a small minority?

The connection between the Jewish story and the American story reached its full expression in this book, but it was something that I’d started to think about long before I wrote it. As I got more involved in American foreign policy, there was the fact that the U.S.-Israel relationship and the Middle East peace process were consuming such an enormous share of press attention and American political attention. What was that about? I wanted to know.

I don’t know whether that holds any lessons for anybody else. But it’s the story of my encounter.

Thank you for reading this edition of Deep Shtetl, a newsletter about the unexplored intersections of politics, culture, and religion. Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already. As always, send your thoughts, comments, and critiques to deepshtetl@theatlantic.com.

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.