President Joe Biden’s fiery Thursday night State of the Union speech was bad news for the preferred narrative from pro-Trump commentators that Biden is a dementia patient on the brink of death. So they responded by baselessly claiming he must have been on performance-enhancing drugs.
The right has sought to leverage Biden’s age, stutter, and well-known tendency to make verbal gaffes since his 2020 presidential campaign. Republican Party operatives promote out-of-context snippets featuring his miscues, which are then amplified by the right-wing media megaphone and leak into the mainstream press. Fox News and its rivals depict the president as an addled old man whose reelection campaign constitutes elder abuse.
That portrayal crashed and burned on Thursday night, with news outlets describing Biden as making “a forceful case” during a “feisty,” “scrappy,” “energetic” “stemwinder” that may have “reset the 2024 campaign.” As it became clear that no one would buy this speech as evidence that Biden is too old to be president, you could see the right settle in real time on an alternate, evidence-free narrative: Biden was on drugs.
Fox anchor Julie Banderas provided a case study in this progression. As Biden prepared to begin his speech at 9:21 p.m., she posted that she was watching the speech “from bed. Didn’t need to a take a Melatonin tonight, this should do it.” By 9:45 p.m., with her preferred narrative dead, she grasped for a new one and alleged that Biden was on cocaine: “I think I just got to the bottom of the untraceable little baggie found at the White House.”
Her right-wing allies quickly converged on the same narrative.
- OutKick’s Clay Travis, 9:44 p.m.: “What drugs have they shot him up with tonight? This is not how normal people talk.”
- Right-wing cartoonist Ben Garrison, 9:45 p.m.: “They really jacked up Joe with the drugs tonight- think there's a IV bag under his jacket?”
- TownHall’s Kurt Schlicter, 9:49 p.m.: “Maybe the paramedic who called into @HughHewitt this morning and told me Biden would be on cocaine was right!”
- Podcaster Monica Crowley, 9:53 p.m.: “Biden, pumped full of god-knows-what drugs to make it through this pack of lies, blasts Pharma.”
- Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway, 9:54 p.m.: “Plot twist: It was Joe Biden's cocaine in the White House!”
- RealClearInvestigations’ Mark Hemingway, 9:57 p.m.: “The rushed jittery pace of this speech is the drugs, right?”
- Fox host Greg Gutfeld, 10 p.m.: “Think we found out who that coke belonged to.”
Donald Trump himself claimed Biden was in an altered state during the speech. “THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF!” he posted at 9:59 p.m.
Even Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), the former White House doctor whom the Navy demoted following an inspector general report finding he drank and took Ambien while on duty and whose medical operation reportedly functioned as a pill mill for Trump White House staffers, got into the act.
“Whatever they gave to Biden is wearing off! He is struggling big time! As I have been saying for years now, Joe Biden is NOT fit to be President!” he posted at 10:22 p.m.
Fox host and close Trump ally Sean Hannity took the narrative to the right-wing network in the 11 p.m. hour, trying to coin a new nickname for Biden: “Jacked-up Joe.”
“Everybody knew that Joe had a very big challenge coming into tonight because — and we’ll show tapes throughout the night of his cognitive decline,” he later explained. “Clearly, well, Jacked-up Joe perhaps overcompensated and I think that's being charitable.”
Hannity clearly thought this moniker was very clever: He and his guests described Biden as “jacked-up” at least 9 times over the course of the show.
This is what it looks like when the right is floundering for a response after one of its cherished talking points publicly implodes: They just start making stuff up. Reporters should keep that in mind in the future when assessing whether to treat right-wing claims about the president’s mental stamina with credulity.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
