Brooks: Biden ‘Adequate’, ‘His Staff Would Do the Things He Needed to Do’, But He Has ‘Worrisome’ ‘Decline’

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that the President Joe Biden we saw at Thursday’s the NATO press conference “is an adequate President. He would make the right judgments, his staff would do the things he needed to do, and he’d be an adequate President.” And that President Joe Biden’s “decline is genuinely worrisome.”

Brooks began by stating, “All of us in the media have one thing in common: We’re all in the communication business, and so, smooth articulation is super important to all of us. And when we see Joe Biden not smoothly articulating, we assume it’s an indictment on his entire cognitive abilities. And I think that’s a little overstretched.”

He continued, “On the other hand, in my — I will just speak for myself, the Biden we saw at the press conference, I think, is an adequate President. He would make the right judgments, his staff would do the things he needed to do, and he’d be an adequate President. But nobody’s worried about 2024. They’re worried about 2025 and 2026 and 2027. And we’ve all had relatives and friends who’ve declined. And, often, the pattern is gradually, gradually, all at once. And so, the decline is genuinely worrisome. So, I don’t think we’re paying attention to nothing here. We’re paying attention to whether the President of the United States has the ability to do the hardest job in the world. And so, I think that’s legitimate.”

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