Joe Biden wandered off. Standing among the west’s major leaders in Italy last week, the US president turned away, seemingly in confusion, and had to be alerted back to the group to take a photo – at least, that’s what rightwing media showed. “WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?” the Republican National Committee’s research Twitter account wrote .
In actuality, it was nothing strange at all. Biden had turned toward skydivers and given them a thumbs up, a broader view of the video showed. It happened again at a fundraiser with former president Barack Obama.
Biden “appears to freeze up” on stage, the New York Post wrote , saying Obama had to lead Biden off the stage in the latest example of the president being “dazed or confused”. A zoomed-out video of the incident showed Biden waving and taking in the applause from the crowd after a lengthy discussion moderated by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel . For viewers of rightwing media or social media feeds tailored toward conservatives, these videos of Biden surface near-daily in an attempt to underscore one of the president’s key liabilities, his age.
They’re often selectively edited to make Biden look, well, old. They kick off a series of headlines about how his age or senility is showing, then another series of headlines about how the videos are created to mislead. The videos, and the subsequent hand-wringing over them, show how bifurcated today’s political and social media ecosystems are.
Few watch a full speech or a full .