Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) is also a physician and served as the top White House doctor under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Having left the White House in 2019 to run for Congress, Jackson never had the opportunity to act as the Chief Medical Advisor to Joe Biden, but that doesn’t mean that he’s done diagnosing the medical issues of presidents. Appearing on Fox News, Jackson rather bluntly called for Biden to take a cognitive function test, predicting that Uncle Joe has something “seriously wrong with him” and that he would either be forced to resign or his cabinet would remove him under the 25th Amendment. It’s hard to say precisely which recent performance of Biden’s spurred this response, but he certainly seems to be engaged in the topic. (Daily Mail)
House Rep. Ronny Jackson, who served as the top White House physician under the Obama and Trump administrations, has predicted President Joe Biden won’t finish his term in office because of a lack of fitness for the job.
‘Something is SERIOUSLY wrong with Biden – and it’s only going to get WORSE!’ the Republican congressman from Texas tweeted on Thursday.
‘It’s past the point of embarrassment. He’s lost. He can barely put a coherent sentence together.’
Jackson added: ‘He MUST have a cognitive exam and release the results!’
The tweet referenced above also includes the video clip from the interview if you want to get a full impression of how certain Jackson seems to be.
Something's SERIOUSLY wrong with Biden – and it's only going to get WORSE! It's past the point of embarrassment. He's lost. He's confused. He can barely put a coherent sentence together. He MUST have a cognitive exam and release the results! pic.twitter.com/Pk5Pq2V5Um
— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) July 23, 2021
Being a Republican congressman from a red state, much of the media will no doubt blow this off as a partisan attack, and I’m not going to rule out the possibility that there is something along those lines going on here. But at the same time, it’s not as if Jackson is speaking from outside of his wheelhouse. He’s been the Physician to the President during administrations from both parties and he’s not without experience in these matters. Also, can you honestly watch Biden’s various performances in office and on the campaign trail and not start to wonder what’s going on inside the West Wing these days?
It’s also fair to point out that there were plenty of people in the media and among congressional Democrats who were more than happy to openly speculate about whether or not Donald Trump had full command of his faculties or was in some way mentally impaired. Trump wound up taking the cognitive function test that Jackson is referring to and he apparently aced it. It’s going to be hard for Biden’s defenders to claim that the actions taken when Trump was in office were okay but this is somehow out of bounds.
Would he agree to it? Unlikely, and I disagree with Jackson that Biden’s cabinet will be in any hurry to rush him out the door. I don’t know who is making all of the key decisions in the White House these days, but the Democrats would likely be fine with keeping Joe around as a figurehead and letting the cabinet make the various calls that are required if Biden doesn’t seem to be up to it. The alternative would be coaxing him into embarrassing himself by admitting that he can’t cut the mustard or endure the optics of a forced removal, proving to everyone that they backed a candidate who shouldn’t have been put into office.
On top of that, if they get rid of Joe Biden, they’re stuck with Kamala Harris. Her approval ratings are underwater and barely better than Trump’s were at this point in his presidency, and her “very unfavorable” rating is close to 40. White House insiders have already expressed concerns that Harris couldn’t beat any Republican in 2024, including Donald Trump (if he runs).
Unfortunately for the Democrats, those are about all of the available options on the table. The most likely route appears to be just sticking with the status quo, riding this out at least until the midterms, and hoping for a better landscape by then if all of the pandemic craziness is fully behind us. But if prices keep going up and the inflation monster comes fully out of the closet, they could be in for a very bumpy ride. Until then, perhaps it might just be best to keep Uncle Joe off-camera as much as possible.
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