Republicans and their right-wing media propagandists have spent the last four years smearing President Joe Biden as mentally infirm. That argument keeps exploding in their faces when Biden appears before a national audience in debates and speeches, but the president’s mental acuity is a frequent subject of media attention, and polls show voters are concerned about Biden’s age. 

That’s the context for the 3,000-plus-word investigation that The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday night, which concludes that “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping”  based largely on the complaints of anonymous Republicans who hope Biden loses to Donald Trump in November so the party can implement its agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, restrictions on abortions, and political retribution. The Republican National Committee, Trump’s campaign, and the legion of MAGA supporters, eager for a subject that isn’t their candidate's felony conviction, instantly jumped on the story.

The Journal notably provides no on-the-record statements from anyone speaking against their partisan interests. It would be genuinely revelatory if the Journal found Democrats willing to offer on-the-record comments about Biden’s mental acuity that remotely approached the public statements from former senior Trump aides describing him as “an idiot” who does “crazy” things and lacks understanding of basic concepts.

But the paper spent months conducting interviews with several dozen “Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously” and came away with nothing like that.

Instead, the Journal uncovered negative anecdotes about Biden’s performance in three negotiations dating back to May 2023. 

According to the paper, “most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans.” Among Democrats, “some” — apparently speaking anonymously — “said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges” while others — often on the record — “found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings.” And the Journal further acknowledged that “members of the Biden administration offered numerous examples of other situations that they said showed the president was sharp and engaged.”

The story gets even thinner upon closer inspection.

The sole named critical source for any of the anecdotes is former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who claimed Biden is “not the same person” he was as vice president and said the president would “ramble” and “always had cards” during some of their debt ceiling negotiations in May 2023.

But McCarthy is a notoriously dishonest person, an election denier who lost his speakership because he was widely distrusted and is now attempting a rebrand based on what Politico called “clever truth-bending and big omissions.” And true to form, the record shows that in the lead-up to the debt ceiling negotiations, McCarthy had publicly portrayed Biden as “doddering,” even as he privately “told allies that he has found Mr. Biden to be mentally sharp in meetings,” The New York Times reported at the time.

A second anecdote relies on current House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) apparent recollection of a February one-on-one meeting with Biden in which they discussed his administration’s pause on permit approvals for new liquified natural gas terminals, relayed through “six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened.” 

Johnson, who has every incentive to put their conversation in the worst possible light, reportedly “worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.” But the description of whatever the mix-up was supposed to be is extremely vague — the Journal reports that “Biden said … that the new policy was only a study, according to several people familiar with Johnson’s version of what happened” while a White House spokesman responded by calling the reported version of the conversation “a false account” and explaining that “the study is part of the new policy, and that the pause doesn’t affect current exports.”

The third anecdote features a January 17 meeting at the White House in which Biden discussed the need for military aid to Ukraine with “nearly two dozen congressional leaders.” Here the critique, as provided through anonymous accounts, is that Biden used notecards, reargued points already conceded, slowly worked his way around the room greeting people, spoke softly, and repeatedly deferred to other lawmakers and staffers. 

But on the record, one top Biden aide said the use of notecards is standard practice for presidents; another said Biden turned to aides to answer questions only twice; and several Democrats who attended the meeting provided statements describing Biden’s performance in the meeting as, in the words of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, “incredibly strong, forceful and decisive.” Indeed, the Journal apparently got so many positive comments from Democratic attendees that some were left on the cutting room floor.

Surprise, surprise—everyone attacking @POTUS is a Republican with an agenda.

I made clear to the @WSJ regarding the January meeting on Ukraine that the President was absolutely engaged & ran that meeting in a way that brought everyone together.

I'm not quoted—I wonder why. https://t.co/vokfHWjk6p

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) June 5, 2024

The Journal is perhaps the most credulous of the major newspapers when it comes to the GOP’s campaign to convince the public that Biden’s stammer and occasional verbal stumbles indicate he has dementia. A 2023 Media Matters study found that over several months, the Journal published more than twice as many articles mentioning Biden’s age as Trump’s, and it was less likely to mention Trump’s age in articles mentioning Biden’s than the other papers we reviewed.

The paper was burned on this topic just a few months ago, after then-special counsel Robert Hur, a former clerk to right-wing judges and a Trump administration appointee, took a shot at Biden as seeming like “an elderly man with a poor memory” in their interview. The Journal ran 18 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to Popular Information. Upon the release of the interview transcript, however, the paper reported that it showed Biden “veering into frequent digressions, but not stumped on basic factual questions.”

The Journal apparently responded to that embarrassment by conducting a monthslong investigation finding that Republicans who want Biden to lose the presidential election say that their talking point that he is failing mentally is correct. The result is a telling sign of the news media’s asymmetry: It is impossible to imagine the analogue to this story, in which a news outlet widely read by Republicans would commission and run a story built around Democrats’ anonymous, critical comments about Trump.