When was Biden telling the truth?

OPINION:

It was President Biden’s last stand — his final attempt against forces more powerful by the minute — to preserve his place atop the Democratic Party ticket last summer. As in 2020, he turned for lifesaving support to the African American community.

The setting was last year’s annual NAACP convention, themed “All In,” at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. On July 16, the president delivered the keynote address.

Widespread panic among Democrats over Mr. Biden’s debate performance against former President Donald Trump 19 days earlier, a news cycle of doom for the incumbent interrupted only briefly by the shooting of Mr. Trump on July 13, prompted Mr. Biden to begin his remarks to the NAACP crowd, some 1,500 strong, by invoking President Harry Truman’s maxim that those seeking friends in Washington should get a dog.

“After the last couple of weeks, I know what he means,” Mr. Biden said, drawing laughter.

The central argument the president advanced at “All In” — effectively the last campaign rally for himself after 52 years on the national stage — was that while he no longer walked or talked like he used to, as he had conceded in Raleigh, North Carolina, the day after the debate, he still possessed the chief attribute in a chief executive: “I know how to tell the truth!” 

Thunderous applause.

“Are you all in?”

More thunder.

“Because I’m all in!”

Five days later, he was out.

Today, with Mr. Biden’s handpicked successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, soundly defeated by the former president, the sun is setting on the Biden-Harris administration. And no assessment of it is more urgent, in the short term and for future historians, than the determination of whether Mr. Biden, when he told us he knows how to tell the truth, was telling the truth.

More aptly: If we accept that Mr. Biden did know how to tell the truth, was he usually inclined, as a matter of habit or self-interest, to do so?

To believe as much requires the surveyor to overlook an awful lot over an awfully long time.

“Biden Admits Plagiarism in School But Says It Was Not ‘Malevolent,’” read a headline in the Sept. 19, 1987, New York Times. At the time, Mr. Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman presiding over the destruction of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; three months earlier, the garrulous Delawarean had declared his candidacy for president.

The disclosure that Mr. Biden had cheated in law school compounded the damage from revelations that his campaign rhetoric had been lifted from a British politician, a transgression the senator dismissed, not for the first time, as an oversight.

In its December 1965 report, the faculty of the Syracuse University College of Law concluded that young Mr. Biden “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution.” He told examiners the theft was inadvertent: “I value my word above all else.” (He later secured a ruling from the Delaware Supreme Court reversing the faculty’s conclusion.)

“I’m in the race to stay,” the senator told reporters.

Six days later, he was out.

When he finally won the presidency, addled by cognitive decline already in evidence to those prepared to see it, his wrestling match with the truth resumed.

The edifice of deception erected to conceal Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline, recently exposed in published reporting but certain to emerge in even greater detail when book advances start flying and the National Archives begins its slow churn of disclosure, will be revealed as larger and more elaborate than anything undertaken to hide the infirmities of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, whose knowledge of how to tell the truth was rendered questionable on her third day on the job, when she maintained the stock market “is not something we keep an eye on every day,” showed even more contempt for the truth and the intelligence of the American people when she said the worrisome scenes of her boss’ debility — the wandering, the odd saluting, the freezing and more — were “cheapfake” videos.

Equally brazen an assault on the truth — worse even than the deception surrounding Hunter Biden’s pardon — was the order Mr. Biden gave, captured in contemporaneous emails, to override the White House Stenography Office and alter the official transcript of his damaging remarks, just before Election Day, calling Trump supporters “garbage.”

Mr. Trump, the president-elect, has his own troubles with the facts. But truthfulness was never the centerpiece of his electoral appeals; ruthless effectiveness was.

As the historical assessment of President Biden commences, one question prevails among those who came to doubt his capacity for truthfulness — a majority of Americans, even before last summer’s abdication.

Who was really running the Biden White House?

• James Rosen is chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and author, most recently, of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”