During his speech in Pennsylvania on Friday, President Joe Biden appeared to be suddenly overcome with anger at one point and started shou...
During his speech in Pennsylvania on Friday, President Joe Biden appeared to be suddenly overcome with anger at one point and started shouting.
In the opinion of conservative commentator Candace Owens, this was a symptom of Biden’s declining cognitive state.
He was talking about his child care plan at Mill 19 in Pittsburgh before his outburst. Specifically, Biden said he wanted to address the problem of families who cannot afford insulin for their diabetic children.
“Imagine being the parent making the minimum wage or twice the minimum wage and having a child with Type 1 diabetes, knowing that if you can’t — and have no insurance — knowing if you cannot get that money for the insulin, your child might die,” the president said.
It was at this point that Biden became visibly angry and began yelling into the microphone.
“It strips you of your dignity, dammit!” he said. “Can you imagine looking at your child and you know what they need and not be able to do it?”
“Many of you have lost children. Many of you have seen — imagine,” the president said, pounding the lectern. “It’s outrageous!”
Biden is not wrong to be angry about the situation he is describing. No child should die because his or her family cannot afford insulin.
With that said, his anger seemed very sudden and out of place. It’s one thing to be upset about a situation, but it’s another thing to just start yelling into the microphone, and that is the point Owens made in her tweet.
“This is dementia,” she wrote Friday. “Anybody who has ever seen a loved one suffer from it recognizes these outbursts. Jill Biden and the entire Democratic Party should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for having been willing to exercise elder abuse for power. They knew before he ran.”
Owens is not a doctor, of course, but she is correct that the president’s sudden outburst could be a symptom of cognitive decline.
In July, psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed said Biden was showing classic symptoms of dementia.
“You get the feeling he’s almost just hanging on — which can be a feature of dementia,” Ahmed said.
The Mayo Clinic lists both “inappropriate behavior” and “agitation” as symptoms of dementia, and Biden’s outburst could fall into both of these categories.
He has also displayed other symptoms, including memory loss and difficulty communicating.
Even in the context of this latest angry outburst, Biden showed a lack of understanding about his own policies.
Right after he took office, the president paused an executive order by his predecessor, Donald Trump, that delivered cheaper insulin and epinephrine to low-income patients.
Biden later proposed a price cap for insulin in his Build Back Better Act, according to The Hill, but it only applied to people who had health insurance or were covered under Medicare.
For those under 65 without health insurance, the price cap on insulin would not apply. In Biden’s hypothetical anecdote, he was talking about the uninsured parent of a young child, so that person would most likely not receive the benefit of the price cap.
In an attempt to drum up support for his agenda, the president erupted in an emotional outburst and displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of his own policies.
Only a doctor can diagnose him with dementia, but at the very least, it was an extremely concerning look for the president.
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