By Joe Saunders,
When President Joe Biden sat down with a podcaster who focuses on mental health, he probably wasn’t intending to be a case study.
But that’s what happened with an interview published to YouTube on Monday, where the president fielded softball questions from British podcaster Jay Shetty.
And made himself look worse than even his worst critics would have expected.
During the interview, Biden repeated a by-now thoroughly debunked story about a supposed encounter with an Amtrak conductor who supposedly kept track of the number of miles Biden had traveled by train.
(As a senator representing Delaware, Biden used Amtrak for the short commute between his home and Washington.)
Regular readers of The Western Journal and other conservative media have caught versions of the Biden train story before — like here and here and here.
But for those who’ve somehow missed it, or just want to hear Biden spin another iteration of it, here’s what the president told Shetty:
“I commuted every day, 300 miles a day,” Biden said. “I got to know all the conductors so well, and we became friends.
“One day as vice president, I was going home on the train — which the Secret Service doesn’t like because there’s so many opportunities to interrupt the train.
“And this particular, I’m not going to embarrass him and say his name, grabbed me by the cheek and goes, ‘Joey, baby!’ I thought they were going to shoot him.”
The conductor then told Biden that he’d calculated that Biden had traveled more than 1 million miles on Amtrak.
“My point was, I was on the train a lot,” Biden said.
The actual point is, Biden lies a lot — and Republicans took it public.
It isn’t just conservative media outlets that have looked into the apocryphal Amtrak story.
A CNN “fact check” in June 2021 called it “false.”
The Associated Press came to the same conclusion in October 2021, when Biden told the story again, after vowing “swear to God. True story.”
Basically, any news organization that’s looked into it has realized it’s bunk.
The conductor Biden talked about (he’s named him in other versions, no nonsense about “embarrassing him” then) died in 2014 — before Biden became vice president — and had retired 20 years before that.
Everyone around Biden has to know the story is false. At some point, Biden himself had to know the story was false. But the question for Americans now is, does he believe it’s true?
He might. Biden might really believe that a conversation like that happened — just as he might really believe he was a marcher for civil rights (he wasn’t), that he was a liaison for Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the Six-Day War (he wasn’t — Biden wasn’t a senator during the Six-Day War, and Meir wasn’t Israel’s prime minister).
He might really think that his helicopter “went down” in Afghanistan (it did, but only the way every other helicopter has gone up and down since there’ve been helicopters), that his house almost burned down in a near-deadly blaze (it didn’t), and so forth and so on in the Walter Mitty world of the country’s 46th president.
The point is, none of those things are true.
Americans who have followed Biden’s career over the years — regardless of their party — know he’s never been an honest man. The only serious question for those who follow politics is whether Biden’s dishonesty works in their favor.
In the Democratic case, it has been useful, since Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 created the blood-lust atmosphere that surrounds Republican Supreme Court nominations today.
The Democratic lies and libel that smeared now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 can be traced directly back to the Biden-Ted Kennedy smears of Bork during the Reagan administration. (The late journalist George Neumayr explained it neatly in The Hill in 2020.)
So even Democrats have to know Biden is a liar. And Americans who’ve heard him tell story after debunked story have to know it, too. It’s been true his entire career.
But at this point, something has changed. Biden’s lies have been exposed too many times — particularly the Amtrak story — for anyone to expect they’ll be believed — unless that individual actually believes them himself.
The man who holds the presidency at the moment isn’t simply a boastful stretcher of the truth. He’s not just a congenial con man. What that story to a British podcaster published Monday showed was that Biden is simply disconnected from reality.
As evidence of his own and his family’s corruption becomes more public, and more damning, as the failure of his own presidency from the economy to immigration to foreign policy becomes more and more unavoidable, it’s becoming increasingly clear Biden himself is not even close to operating with the mental acuity required of one of the world’s most demanding jobs — or its least demanding jobs for that matter.
According to Reuters, Shetty’s production is the No. 1 mental health podcast in the United States.
With Monday’s publication, Shetty hit paydirt.
A mental health basket case, masquerading as a United States president.
If this is really what Democrats are running on in 2024, the Republican field looks better every day.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
