“Let’s be honest here. Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time. He’s incapable of leading and he’s incapable of carrying out his duties. Period. Everyone knows it. No one is willing to say it. But we have to, for the sake of the country. Joe Biden can’t do the job.”
This unproven notion — that Biden is somehow enfeebled — has been kicking around conservative media and Trump-allied circles for some time now. The evidence usually revolves around clips of Biden misspeaking or stumbling over his words — and the fact that, at age 79, he is the oldest person ever to serve as president.
Let’s take a step back here to understand why Scott went absolutely nuclear on Biden. He went on to say in the same statement that Biden needs to resign for the good of the country.
“If Republicans return to Washington’s business as usual, if we have no bigger plan than to be a speed bump on the road to America’s collapse, we don’t deserve to govern,” he wrote of the plan.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made clear that a) he did not authorize Scott’s plan b) he did not think it was good politics and c) he had no plans to implement pieces of it if Republicans retook the Senate majority this fall.
What McConnell clearly feared was that Scott had handed Democrats a way to make the election about something other than their full control of Congress and the White House. It gave Democrats a target to shoot at — which they promptly did.
Biden, struggling in polls and clearly concerned about the possibility of losing the House and Senate this fall, has aggressively seized on Scott’s plan as a way to suggest that putting Republicans in charge of Congress would be lead to extremism.
Why not throw himself into that crowd? Scott likely relished being in a perceived one-on-one fight with the sitting Democratic President and knows that there is literally nothing at all that he can say about Biden that would be seen as taking things too far by the MAGA crowd.
Now, is it a good thing for our democracy to have a Republican senator publicly suggesting that the President is “incoherent, incapacitated and confused”? Um, no. Does Scott care about that? Also no.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
