Peggy Noonan is not some poorly-paid reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, out in the hinterlands and isolated from the centers of elite power, but a Washington insider — though she now lives in New York City — beginning with the Reagan Administration, who now writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal, and is a regular contributor to other credentialed media sources. She is frequently a panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” While she is described as being mostly “center-right,” but she distanced herself from the Republican Party when Donald Trump was winning the 2016 nomination. She called on Congress to censure President Trump following the release of the Mueller Report.

The President Who Wasn’t There

What we’re learning about the Biden White House is reminiscent of Woodrow and Edith Bolling Wilson.

by Peggy Noonan | Boxing Day, December 26, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.

The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.

In a front-page story this month, the Journal’s Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of “a diminished leader.” He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president’s staff seemed to be running things. This system “insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”

Miss Noonan then continues to tell us the story of President Woodrow Wilson, seriously handicapped by a stroke or series of strokes in 1919, how his condition was kept secret from the public, and his wife, Edith Boling Wilson, curated everything that the President saw. She condensed the material he received, and though she claimed that she never took any of the President’s decisions herself, she was the one who decided what was important for the President to know, and what was not.

Then she told us that President Ronald Reagan was going downhill toward the end of his Administration. It all read like some kind of cockamamie justification for President Joe Biden and his handlers to hide his condition.

The credentialed media, the Washington elite, all knew that President Biden was going downhill, and was from the very beginning of his term, yet they did everything they could to keep the ‘secret.’ And if there was this kind of ‘secret’ that the credentialed media knew, the odds that Miss Noonan was out of the loop on this are vanishingly small.

Conservative bloggers knew of his diminished and diminishing status, and we published it on blogs and in social media, but the credentialed media refused to investigate it and refused to publish what they knew.

We’d prefer to see more of a mea culpa from the media who kept as much as they could under wraps. CNN’s Chris Cillizza at least acknowledged that he should have pushed harder to investigate the stories, which is, at the very least, an acknowledgement that he knew about Mr Biden’s dementia to some extent. If he knew, so did others.

Of course, the legacy media cannot actually admit the whole truth here, because it would expose them as being exactly what they are: as Robert Stacy McCain has called them, “Democrats with bylines.” But they don’t need them to admit the truth; we already know it.