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The Right's Biden Revisionism

For years, right-wing media pushed a warped narrative of Joe Biden as a brain-dead puppet controlled by sinister, shadowy forces. Now they’re demanding vindication—but they do not deserve it.

Author

Oliver Darcy
May 21, 2025

Sean Hannity hosts the Fox News program “Hannity.” (Screen grab via SnapStream)

Over the last week, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, "Original Sin," has landed with a flurry of attention-grabbing headlines—not just for the reporting, but for what Tapper has said during the press tour. In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday, Tapper declared that “conservative media was right and conservative media was correct” about Joe Biden's mental state.

But that’s not quite true. Or rather, it simplifies a much more nuanced media and political reality. While it’s fair to argue that the press should have covered Biden’s age with greater urgency—and to acknowledge that Biden clearly lost a step during his presidency—that’s a far cry from validating the deeply irresponsible narrative right-wing media spun for years: that the president of the United States was a mentally incapacitated puppet with dementia, unaware of his own surroundings, and propped up by a “shadow government” running the country in his name.

That was never journalism. It was propaganda…

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Donald Trump hosts South Africa's president in the Oval Office. (Screen grab)

Trump's NBC Tirade: Donald Trump lashed out at NBC News' parent company, Comcast, during a wild Oval Office gaggle in which he treated South Africa's president to a blizzard of lies about supposed “white genocide.” The threat came after Trump played a misleading video about the country’s white farmers and NBC White House correspondent Peter Alexander dared to…

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