by Harold Hutchinson
Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said Thursday night that the Democratic Party could face a “tea party” movement after the Biden administration concealed the truth about President Joe Biden’s health.
A Wall Street Journal article published Thursday revealed White House aides “insulated” Biden, even from Cabinet members, from the first year of his presidency. Roginsky said that the “lying” about Biden’s health would have consequences for Democrats.
“There is a bigger problem here, and that is that I think Democrats are at the point where Republicans might have been right after the Bush election or after the Bush term was up, which is that I think Democrats are starting to mistrust their institutions,” Roginsky said. “And this goes back to a bipartisan effort to lie us into the Iraq war, not just by George Bush, but also by a lot of Democrats.
“It has to do with the fact that Barack Obama did not hold anybody accountable after the 2008 crisis, which also happened on George Bush’s watch, but he became president, he never threw a hostage on the tarmac from Wall Street,” Roginsky continued. “You saw the rise of Bernie Sanders as a result of that, and you saw a lot of institutional Democrats, me included, saying, no, no, no, this is not the time. We have to stick with the institution.”
Similar articles published by the Wall Street Journal earlier in the year to their Thursday article generated pushback from some media outlets, with many pundits claiming Biden’s health was not in decline.
“I think you have a lot of Democrats now, me included, who are pretty sick of the institution and trusting people in the institution and this is just one example, the most recent example, I think of people institutionally lying to the American people and what you’re ultimately going to see,” Roginsky continued. “And I don’t have a problem saying this as a Democrat, is that you’re going to see a tea party version rise up in the Democratic Party based on the fact that this is yet another marker of people just not trusting our leaders anymore. And I’m sorry to say that, but I think we brought this on ourselves.”
Democratic Rep. Adam Smith of Washington told the Wall Street Journal about having difficulty reaching Biden during the disastrous August 2021 pullout from Afghanistan. The only time Smith spoke with Biden directly during Biden’s term in office was after a heated exchange with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
On multiple occasions during his presidency, Biden has said he spoke with people who had died, including claiming to have spoken with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and former French President Francois Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996. In September 2022, Biden asked for Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana at a conference on hunger that took place several weeks after Walorski and two staffers were killed in a car crash.
Biden also has suffered multiple falls during his term in office, including one at the Air Force Academy in June 2023, falling down while on his bike in June 2022 and stumbling on the steps of Air Force One on multiple occasions. Biden now takes a different set of stairs onto the VC-25 used as Air Force One, among other concessions to his age.
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Harold Hutchinson is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
