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The Journal
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Journal
During a reflective day in Hiroshima, the Taoiseach is reminded it's a small world
Christina Finn reports from Osaka 'THE WORLD IS indeed a small place', Taoiseach Micheál Martin said today after meeting with Teruko Yahata, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing in 1945. She was just eight years old when the bomb was dropped on her home city. The Taoiseach said he was moved by her testimony, stating that she told him how her family had moved to the hills, but when they came back down there was 'rows of people coming back up with burns and skin peeling off their arms'. She also spoke about the burns and shrapnel that had been stuck in her mother's back and of all her friends who were killed that day. Her daughter ended up getting married to an Irishman living in the UK and her grandson, called Conor, is now a doctor working in London, hence the small world reference made by the Taoiseach today. Yahata remains a very committed campaigner for the ending of nuclear weapons in war. In 2013, she was appointed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Ambassador for Denuclearization. She started activities as an atomic bomb witness for the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation in 2019. She began taking English lessons at the age of 83, in order to speak about the terrible reality and suffering in her own voice and words. Advertisement Never far from home The Taoiseach travelled to Hiroshima today to lay a wreath at the cenotaph and to ring the Peace Bell at the site, and while it was a sombre place, there were light moments that reminded him that you're never really far from home. When walking over towards the concrete, saddle-shaped monument covering the cenotaph, which holds the names of all of the people killed by the atomic bomb, the Taoiseach was stopped by Sarah Collins from Tipperary and Alan Rattigan from Galway who were on a visit to the city. 'Can we get a picture Mr Taoiseach?' said Collins and the Taoiseach happily obliged. 'Are you going to beat Kilkenny?' he asked. 'Let's hope so,' she replied, telling the Taoiseach she has her jersey in the bag ready for Sunday. 'Are you enjoying your trip,' she asked. 'Yes, we're back tomorrow though,' said the Taoiseach. Sarah Collins and Alan Rattigan taking a selfie with the Taoiseach. Christina Finn Christina Finn He later bumped into another couple from Meath who were also holidaying in Japan. A bustling city While many who hear the word 'Hiroshima' think of the devastated and ravaged landscape, such as those seen in photos from 1945, the city is far from desolate. Related Reads Chicken fillet rolls and Cork City: Taoiseach tries to pull the strings for more trade with Japan This Irish embassy in Japan is the state's most expensive building constructed outside Ireland It is now a bustling city and a must-see place for holidaymakers to visit in Japan. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was abuzz with groups of tourists and school children, all there to pay their respects to the thousands that were killed. The Taoiseach was just like them at times. While he is in Japan on business, his days a s history student were evident today, when he had his phone out and was taking photos of the Peace Bell and the other memorials for his own personal collection. While the atomic bomb was dropped 80 years ago this year, there were plenty of parallels being drawn with the present day geopolitical situation. Martin said the world is in a very dangerous place with the threat of nuclear weapons still a reality. The Taoiseach told Japanese reporters today that the reason he was here was to reaffirm Ireland's commitment to peace, telling the media that there are too many wars and conflicts in the world right now. However Mayor of Hiroshima Kazumi Matsui today spoke about the need to break the 'cycle of hatred', stating that while survivors of the atomic bomb have had to live through the most unthinkable of experiences they don't want anyone else to suffer as they have. 'That is the very strong message that our survivors have now,' he said. 'They overcame their hatred,' he said, stating that standing before the cenotaph 'we say we shall not repeat the evil or the mistakes'. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
The Journal
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Journal
Taoiseach lays wreath at Hiroshima memorial, says the world is more dangerous now than in 1945
TAOISEACH MICHEÁL MARTIN laid a wreath at the Memorial Cenotaph for the Atomic Bomb Victims in Hiroshima today. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings at the end of World War II. On the morning of 6 August 1945, most of Hiroshima was destroyed when the US dropped its first atomic bomb directly over the city. Around 70,000 people died instantly and by the year's end a total of 140,000 people had died due to radiation poisoning and other after effects of the bomb. Around 5,000 people per year get added to that list having passed away generally due to radiation related cancers. World War Two destruction after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 1945 Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo Speaking with reporters after his meeting with Mayor of Hiroshima Kazumi Matsui, the Taoiseach expressed Ireland's strong and long-standing commitment to disarmament and denuclearisation. World is in a 'dangerous place' When asked if he thinks the world is a more dangerous place now that it was in 1945, the Taoiseach replied: 'I think it is. It is in a very dangerous place. I think it speaks to at one level, the incredible engineering ingenuity of humankind, and at another level, the stupidity of humankind, on a very basic level that the world is advancing at an extraordinary rate. 'We are on the cusp of the AI revolution, which would be as profound as the industrial revolution, if not more. This is what people say. And yet mankind keeps on developing the means to destroy itself,' he said. The Taoiseach spoke about being at a recent AI summit in Paris whereby one of the presentations was about the application of AI to warfare, which he said 'would really be on a different level altogether in terms of destruction that could be wreaked on humankind'. 'So it is very problematic and I think very worrying, in terms of where we are today,' he added. Advertisement Hiroshima victims Visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which is located at the centre of Hiroshima, the mayor told the Taoiseach about the thousands of names that are recorded at the memorial. The Journal / YouTube He said survivors do not want the 'cycle of hatred' against those that perpetrated the attack on the people of Japan to continue. He said the message from Hiroshima is that 'we should not repeat the evil'. 'We must break the cycle,' the Taoiseach agreed. While visiting today the Taoiseach also rang the Peace Bell and visited the the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, commonly called the A-Bomb Dome, which stands just 160 metres from the hypocentre of the explosion. Aimée-Linh McCartney Aimée-Linh McCartney Speaking about the importance of today's visit, Martin said Ireland and Japan are like-minded, peace-loving countries, stating that there has been a breakdown in the international rules-based system, which the Taoiseach said needs to be restored. Trump's comments on Hiroshima Previous to meeting the Taoiseach today, the mayor of Hiroshima found himself responding to comments from US President Donald Trump. The US president told reporters the US attack on Iran's three nuclear facilities recently were 'essentially the same thing' as the attacks on Japan 80 years ago. 'I wish that President Trump would visit the bombed area to see the reality of the atomic bombing and feel the spirit of Hiroshima, and then make statements,' the mayor said in response this week. A Japanese reporter asked the Taoiseach today what he made of Trump's comments. Martin said that two events were not comparable, in his view. As a student of history, Martin said one has to be careful when looking at contemporary events and applying them to past. 'It doesn't always work,' he said. The Taoiseach told the reported that he doesn't believe that Trump likes war, stating that in his view, the US president's fundamental instinct is to oppose war. Martin said he believes Trump wants peace but said 'sometime it can be very complex to get to peace'. 'But if Iran, for example, was ever to secure a nuclear weapon, then the prospect of proliferation for the nuclear weapons within the Middle East, for example, would grow very significantly, and that's why there's been huge emphasis on preventing Iran from getting a nuclear bomb,' Martin said today. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘You promised you'd take a nap': Inside Hunter Biden's confrontation with Joe after watching dad flail during Ireland trip
Hunter Biden pressed his father, then-President Joe Biden, to rest during a trip to Ireland in April 2023. As the president was welcomed to his ancestral homeland, he set off on a busy schedule, including a tree-planting ceremony, the ringing of the Peace Bell, and an honor guard presenting arms, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write in Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The room Biden was in at one point during the trip grew empty, with fewer than a dozen people left. Two of them were Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley and then-New York Rep. Brian Higgins. Hunter Biden pushed his father to take a step back. 'You promised you wouldn't do this,' he said, according to the authors. 'You promised you'd take a nap. You know you can't handle all this.' Biden disregarded his son's concerns and walked to the bar in the back of the room, where a woman handed him a soft drink. He appeared exhausted. It was at that point that Quigley realized why the moment felt familiar. It reminded him of his father in his last few years before his death from Parkinson's at the age of 92. Biden and some Democrats alongside him reject that his deterioration occurred. Earlier this month, Biden appeared on The View, where co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked Biden about the 'Democratic sources' who had said that 'in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities. What is your response to these allegations, and are these sources wrong?' 'They are wrong. There's nothing to sustain that,' he responded. Although it wasn't yet announced, Quigley questioned during the trip to Ireland how Biden could run for re-election. While Biden got a boost from the crowds in Ireland, when they weren't present, he grew deflated, the authors write. Quigley believed at that moment that Biden needed to rest for the rest of the day and night. He was physically frail and had lost most of his energy. The authors describe his speech behind the scenes as breathless, soft, and weak. Quigley was frequently reminded of his dad during the trip. The Illinois congressman spoke to Higgins about Biden appearing to have symptoms akin to Parkinson's. However, Higgins viewed the president through a different lens, having lost his own father to Alzheimer's and believing that he was seeing something similar in Biden's shuffling. 'A diagnosis is nothing more than pattern recognition,' Higgins told Tapper and Thompson. 'When people see that stuff, it conjures up a view that there's something going on neurologically.' He added that Biden's cognitive decline 'was evident to most people that watched him.' Quigley wondered why the White House physician didn't attempt to diagnose the president. However, he reasoned that Biden's staff may not have wanted to know. The president's staff was elated at his 2024 State of the Union performance. Biden was surrounded by Democrats on the floor of the House following the speech. Quigley hadn't been that close to Biden since the Ireland trip the previous year. When he put his hand on Biden's back, he could feel his ribs and spine. His voice soft and breathy, Biden's eyes darted from side to side. Once again, Quigley was reminded of his late father. Biden's disastrous debate performance a few months later didn't come as a huge shock to Quigley, the book reports. 'We have to be honest with ourselves that it wasn't just a horrible night,' Quigley told CNN's Kasie Hunt on July 2. A few days later, he became one of the first Democrats to call for the president to step back from the ticket.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Congressman Who Saw the Truth About Biden
Midway through President Joe Biden's four-day trip to Ireland in April 2023, Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois realized whom the president reminded him of and why. The proudly Irish president was in great spirits, energized by the crowds. In Ballina, he delivered a speech to one of the biggest audiences of his political career. Standing in front of Saint Muredach's Cathedral, the president recalled that 27,000 of the bricks used in its construction were provided in 1828 by his great-great-great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, for £21 and 12 shillings. 'I was able to hold one of them in my hand today,' the president said. 'They're damn heavy.' The crowd laughed. It was a homecoming in many ways. The president had brought with him his sister, Valerie, and son Hunter. They went to see a memorial plaque to Beau Biden at the Mayo Roscommon Hospice. One of the priests at the Knock Shrine turned out to have given Beau last rites in 2015, a revelation that brought the president to tears. In a speech to the joint houses of the Irish Parliament, the president said it was Beau who 'should be the one standing here giving this speech to you.' [Read: Biden the sinner] In Dublin on Thursday, April 13, Biden was welcomed to Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the president of Ireland. The busy schedule included a tree-planting ceremony, a ringing of the Peace Bell, and an honor guard presenting arms. At one point, the room Biden was in emptied out and fewer than a dozen people were left—including Quigley and his friend Brian Higgins, then a congressman representing New York. Hunter took advantage of the lull to impress upon his father the need to rest. 'You promised you wouldn't do this,' Hunter said. 'You promised you'd take a nap. You know you can't handle all this.' The president waved off his son and walked over to the bar in the back of the room, where a lone woman was working. She served him a soft drink. He seemed utterly sapped and not quite there. And that was when Quigley realized why the scene felt so familiar: The president's behavior reminded him of his father's in his final years; he had died of Parkinson's in 2019, at the age of 92. Some Democrats, perhaps chief among them the former president himself, still deny that his very real deterioration happened. On The View earlier this month, the co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, referring primarily to our forthcoming book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, asked the former president about the 'Democratic sources' who 'claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities. What is your response to these allegations, and are these sources wrong?' 'They are wrong. There's nothing to sustain that,' Biden said. For our book, we spoke with more than 200 people, overwhelmingly Democrats, many of whom worked passionately to pass Biden's agenda. They included Cabinet secretaries, administration officials, and members of Congress. Almost all of them would talk with us only after the election, and they told their stories in sadness and good faith. People such as Mike Quigley. Quigley's father, Bill, was abandoned as an infant at an Indiana orphanage, then adopted by a World War I veteran and his wife. The application form asked what gender child they preferred to adopt. 'Any child we can love,' they wrote. Bill took his dad's name and, when he was old enough, worked with him on farms as a handyman. Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, Bill became a member of the Signal Corps, learning skills that would get him a postwar job at AT&T for 35 years. Bill never finished college, but he worked hard and built a loving middle-class life for his family. He was his son Mike's hero. Bill's last years were tough. Parkinson's is a brutal disease. Because he lived in a small town, his problems were initially misdiagnosed, but the deterioration was unmistakable, and it was difficult on the entire family. When everyone showed up at family functions, Bill would get an adrenaline boost. When the high wore off, though, it was akin to witnessing all the air empty from a balloon. For Mike, watching his father deflated and drained was heartbreaking. [From the January/February 2020 issue: What Joe Biden can't bring himself to say] And as he watched Biden during that April 2023 trip, Mike Quigley thought it all looked very familiar. The president hadn't yet officially announced that he was running for reelection, though it was expected. How can he do this? Quigley asked himself. The president gained strength from the adoring Irish crowds. And away from them, he seemed as if all the life had left him. Biden, Quigley thought to himself, needed to go to bed for the rest of the day and night. He wasn't merely physically frail; he had lost almost all of his energy. His speech behind the scenes was breathless, soft, weak. There was so much about the president on this trip that reminded Quigley of his dad. Quigley told Brian Higgins how much the president's symptoms seemed Parkinsonian. But Higgins had his own frame of reference. He had lost his father to Alzheimer's and thought he was noticing something familiar in the president's shuffling. 'A diagnosis is nothing more than pattern recognition,' Higgins would later tell us. 'When people see that stuff, it conjures up a view that there's something going on neurologically.' [Helen Lewis: Biden's age is now unavoidable] The president's deterioration became pronounced in 2023, the year of the Ireland trip. Quietly, Democratic officials were beginning to wonder whether the president was in cognitive decline—'which was evident to most people that watched him,' Higgins said. After all, the fate of the nation depended on Biden's ability to mount a strong reelection campaign. On the floor of the House and in caucus meetings throughout 2023 and early 2024, House Democrats who had witnessed such moments—although only a few, because access to Biden was so limited—talked about what they'd seen and what they could do. Quigley wondered why the White House physician didn't pursue a diagnosis to see what was wrong with the president—but, he figured, perhaps Biden's staff simply didn't want to know. He also felt as if he had no good options. He could talk about what he'd seen, he could lament it, but he and other Democrats asked one another: What the hell could they actually achieve? At the end of the day, all they would likely accomplish would be angering the president. In 2023, with Donald Trump facing fierce legal headwinds and strong GOP challengers—Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis—some Democrats' concerns about Biden's decline were tempered by their erroneous belief that Trump couldn't win, which lowered the stakes. The consensus among these Democrats was that going public with their concerns would serve only to get them in a lot of trouble. Biden was going to be the nominee—no one serious was challenging him in the primaries—so why would they want to draw attention to his decline? Their concerns about Biden were not the stuff of right-wing conspiracists. They were worried because people they loved had fallen victim to some of the cruelties that time delivers. And frankly, they were late to the realization. The American people had been expressing serious concerns about Biden's abilities, because of his age, for years. Concerns over the age of presidential hopefuls weren't even specific to Biden. In 1991, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee from the previous election, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, hired a young pollster named Geoff Garin to secretly explore the prospect of Bentsen running for president the next year. Garin ran the numbers and came back to the Texan with bad news: Voters thought that the senator, at age 70, was simply too old. More than 30 years later, Garin did polling for Biden and saw much the same result. In a way, the argument was irrefutable. The American people might have been confused about tariffs, unsure of how to tackle the deficit, and uncertain how to handle the challenges of the migrant crisis, but they understood what aging does. They had seen their grandparents and parents go through it. And they did not want a president navigating those challenges. In October 2022, one of us, Jake, got a chance to interview Biden, his last such opportunity. Biden was not the man Jake had interviewed in September 2020—he was slower and stiffer, his voice thinner—but his responses were razor-sharp compared with his performance at the June 27, 2024, debate that Jake co-moderated with Dana Bash on CNN. In that October interview, after noting that Biden was about to turn 80, Jake said that whenever anyone raised concerns about his age, Biden would always say, 'Watch me.' But voters had been watching him—and one poll showed that almost two-thirds of Democratic voters wanted a new nominee, mainly because of Biden's age. [Read: How Biden destroyed his legacy] 'Well, they're concerned about whether or not I'd get anything done,' Biden said. 'Look what I've gotten done. Name me a president, in recent history, who's gotten as much done as I have in the first two years. Not a joke. You may not like what I got done. But the vast majority of the American people do like what I got done.' That wasn't particularly true—more than two-thirds of the country thought the nation was on the wrong track, and Biden's approval rating was underwater—and it was also not the question Jake had asked. The president and his inner circle had assessed his age as a political liability, but they hadn't stopped to consider the question of his actual ability. They sought to hide the fact that vigor was a commodity in scarce supply. The president and his team were delighted by his lively performance at the 2024 State of the Union. Afterward, when Biden came down onto the floor of the House of Representatives, he was swarmed by adoring Democrats. Quigley hadn't been so close to Biden since they were in Dublin almost a year before. He put his hand on the president's back. He could feel his ribs, and his spine. It seemed weird to consider, but it made him think of what it would be like to touch the aged, feeble Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. The president's voice was soft and breathy. His eyes darted from side to side. Quigley was again disconcertingly reminded of his late father. The president's disastrous debate performance a few months later was not a tremendous surprise to Quigley. 'We have to be honest with ourselves that it wasn't just a horrible night,' Quigley told CNN's Kasie Hunt on July 2. A few days later, he became one of the first Democratic officials to call for the president to step down from the ticket. He was reminded of when he'd had to take the car keys from his mother, who was losing her vision. The response was predictable. 'What the fuck are you doing?' one colleague asked him. 'It's too late!' said another. Then-Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota had tried to sound the alarm about all this in 2022, vainly attempting to recruit midwestern governors to challenge the incumbent president in the primaries before ultimately launching his own campaign. Drawing attention to the president's declining acuity was pretty much his only issue. The party apparatus circled around the president like the Praetorian Guard, shielding him from debates and trying to keep Phillips off ballots. Given his lack of traction in polls, Phillips soon disappeared. When Special Counsel Robert Hur, who had been investigating Biden for improperly possessing and sharing classified materials, tried to discuss the president's memory and presentation when explaining his decision not to prosecute, the Democratic Party and White House painted him as a right-wing hack. Journalists who raised the issue were viciously attacked by lawmakers and besmirched on social media. Quigley experienced some of the same treatment. 'If you bring this up publicly, you're just going to hurt him,' one representative told him. 'What difference does it make?' said another. 'He's the candidate no matter what, so everyone should shut up.' 'You're a traitor!' a fellow member of the Illinois delegation told Quigley after he went public. 'It's ageism. You're going to make us lose!' This past March, town halls for both Democratic and Republican elected officials were so packed with angry constituents that some members of Congress opted instead for virtual meetings that were easier to control, or skipped them entirely. Quigley relished chatting with Chicago communities, despite getting earfuls of complaints. He'd been doing it for 47 years, first as an aide to an alderman and then serving on the Cook County Board of Commissioners before his election to the House. But this spring, the vitriol aimed at Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Illinois's own Senator Dick Durbin has been over-the-top. Quigley has never seen anything like it. 'They go back to the original sin,' Quigley said, explaining their anger at Biden's decision to run for a second term. 'They perceive that he was selfish. He couldn't see that he couldn't win.' People appreciated that Quigley was one of the first Democratic officials to publicly call for Biden to step aside. 'But it was too late,' one activist told him. She was angry at the party's leadership, but most of all, at Biden. 'They couldn't let their egos get out of the way,' she said. 'He saved our democracy and then he doomed it again.' Quigley sensed that Democrats were going to be mad for a long time about the refusal of Biden and those around him to acknowledge what was happening to him. What's more, Quigley knew they were right. This article has been adapted from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's forthcoming book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Congressman Who Saw the Truth About Biden
Midway through President Joe Biden's four-day trip to Ireland in April 2023, Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois realized whom the president reminded him of and why. The proudly Irish president was in great spirits, energized by the crowds. In Ballina, he delivered a speech to one of the biggest audiences of his political career. Standing in front of Saint Muredach's Cathedral, the president recalled that 27,000 of the bricks used in its construction were provided in 1828 by his great-great-great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, for £21 and 12 shillings. 'I was able to hold one of them in my hand today,' the president said. 'They're damn heavy.' The crowd laughed. It was a homecoming in many ways. The president had brought with him his sister, Valerie, and son Hunter. They went to see a memorial plaque to Beau Biden at the Mayo Roscommon Hospice. One of the priests at the Knock Shrine turned out to have given Beau last rites in 2015, a revelation that brought the president to tears. In a speech to the joint houses of the Irish Parliament, the president said it was Beau who 'should be the one standing here giving this speech to you.' In Dublin on Thursday, April 13, Biden was welcomed to Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the president of Ireland. The busy schedule included a tree-planting ceremony, a ringing of the Peace Bell, and an honor guard presenting arms. At one point, the room Biden was in emptied out and fewer than a dozen people were left—including Quigley and his friend Brian Higgins, then a congressman representing New York. Hunter took advantage of the lull to impress upon his father the need to rest. 'You promised you wouldn't do this,' Hunter said. 'You promised you'd take a nap. You know you can't handle all this.' The president waved off his son and walked over to the bar in the back of the room, where a lone woman was working. She served him a soft drink. He seemed utterly sapped and not quite there. And that was when Quigley realized why the scene felt so familiar: The president's behavior reminded him of his father's in his final years; he had died of Parkinson's in 2019, at the age of 92. Some Democrats, perhaps chief among them the former president himself, still deny that his very real deterioration happened. On The View earlier this month, the co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, referring primarily to our forthcoming book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, asked the former president about the 'Democratic sources' who 'claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities. What is your response to these allegations, and are these sources wrong?' 'They are wrong. There's nothing to sustain that,' Biden said. For our book, we spoke with more than 200 people, overwhelmingly Democrats, many of whom worked passionately to pass Biden's agenda. They included Cabinet secretaries, administration officials, and members of Congress. Almost all of them would talk with us only after the election, and they told their stories in sadness and good faith. People such as Mike Quigley. Quigley's father, Bill, was abandoned as an infant at an Indiana orphanage, then adopted by a World War I veteran and his wife. The application form asked what gender child they preferred to adopt. 'Any child we can love,' they wrote. Bill took his dad's name and, when he was old enough, worked with him on farms as a handyman. Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, Bill became a member of the Signal Corps, learning skills that would get him a postwar job at AT&T for 35 years. Bill never finished college, but he worked hard and built a loving middle-class life for his family. He was his son Mike's hero. Bill's last years were tough. Parkinson's is a brutal disease. Because he lived in a small town, his problems were initially misdiagnosed, but the deterioration was unmistakable, and it was difficult on the entire family. When everyone showed up at family functions, Bill would get an adrenaline boost. When the high wore off, though, it was akin to witnessing all the air empty from a balloon. For Mike, watching his father deflated and drained was heartbreaking. From the January/February 2020 issue: What Joe Biden can't bring himself to say And as he watched Biden during that April 2023 trip, Mike Quigley thought it all looked very familiar. The president hadn't yet officially announced that he was running for reelection, though it was expected. How can he do this? Quigley asked himself. The president gained strength from the adoring Irish crowds. And away from them, he seemed as if all the life had left him. Biden, Quigley thought to himself, needed to go to bed for the rest of the day and night. He wasn't merely physically frail; he had lost almost all of his energy. His speech behind the scenes was breathless, soft, weak. There was so much about the president on this trip that reminded Quigley of his dad. Quigley told Brian Higgins how much the president's symptoms seemed Parkinsonian. But Higgins had his own frame of reference. He had lost his father to Alzheimer's and thought he was noticing something familiar in the president's shuffling. 'A diagnosis is nothing more than pattern recognition,' Higgins would later tell us. 'When people see that stuff, it conjures up a view that there's something going on neurologically.' Helen Lewis: Biden's age is now unavoidable The president's deterioration became pronounced in 2023, the year of the Ireland trip. Quietly, Democratic officials were beginning to wonder whether the president was in cognitive decline—'which was evident to most people that watched him,' Higgins said. After all, the fate of the nation depended on Biden's ability to mount a strong reelection campaign. On the floor of the House and in caucus meetings throughout 2023 and early 2024, House Democrats who had witnessed such moments—although only a few, because access to Biden was so limited—talked about what they'd seen and what they could do. Quigley wondered why the White House physician didn't pursue a diagnosis to see what was wrong with the president—but, he figured, perhaps Biden's staff simply didn't want to know. He also felt as if he had no good options. He could talk about what he'd seen, he could lament it, but he and other Democrats asked one another: What the hell could they actually achieve? At the end of the day, all they would likely accomplish would be angering the president. In 2023, with Donald Trump facing fierce legal headwinds and strong GOP challengers—Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis—some Democrats' concerns about Biden's decline were tempered by their erroneous belief that Trump couldn't win, which lowered the stakes. The consensus among these Democrats was that going public with their concerns would serve only to get them in a lot of trouble. Biden was going to be the nominee—no one serious was challenging him in the primaries—so why would they want to draw attention to his decline? Their concerns about Biden were not the stuff of right-wing conspiracists. They were worried because people they loved had fallen victim to some of the cruelties that time delivers. And frankly, they were late to the realization. The American people had been expressing serious concerns about Biden's abilities, because of his age, for years. Concerns over the age of presidential hopefuls weren't even specific to Biden. In 1991, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee from the previous election, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, hired a young pollster named Geoff Garin to secretly explore the prospect of Bentsen running for president the next year. Garin ran the numbers and came back to the Texan with bad news: Voters thought that the senator, at age 70, was simply too old. More than 30 years later, Garin did polling for Biden and saw much the same result. In a way, the argument was irrefutable. The American people might have been confused about tariffs, unsure of how to tackle the deficit, and uncertain how to handle the challenges of the migrant crisis, but they understood what aging does. They had seen their grandparents and parents go through it. And they did not want a president navigating those challenges. In October 2022, one of us, Jake, got a chance to interview Biden, his last such opportunity. Biden was not the man Jake had interviewed in September 2020—he was slower and stiffer, his voice thinner—but his responses were razor-sharp compared with his performance at the June 27, 2024, debate that Jake co-moderated with Dana Bash on CNN. In that October interview, after noting that Biden was about to turn 80, Jake said that whenever anyone raised concerns about his age, Biden would always say, 'Watch me.' But voters had been watching him—and one poll showed that almost two-thirds of Democratic voters wanted a new nominee, mainly because of Biden's age. 'Well, they're concerned about whether or not I'd get anything done,' Biden said. 'Look what I've gotten done. Name me a president, in recent history, who's gotten as much done as I have in the first two years. Not a joke. You may not like what I got done. But the vast majority of the American people do like what I got done.' That wasn't particularly true—more than two-thirds of the country thought the nation was on the wrong track, and Biden's approval rating was underwater—and it was also not the question Jake had asked. The president and his inner circle had assessed his age as a political liability, but they hadn't stopped to consider the question of his actual ability. They sought to hide the fact that vigor was a commodity in scarce supply. The president and his team were delighted by his lively performance at the 2024 State of the Union. Afterward, when Biden came down onto the floor of the House of Representatives, he was swarmed by adoring Democrats. Quigley hadn't been so close to Biden since they were in Dublin almost a year before. He put his hand on the president's back. He could feel his ribs, and his spine. It seemed weird to consider, but it made him think of what it would be like to touch the aged, feeble Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. The president's voice was soft and breathy. His eyes darted from side to side. Quigley was again disconcertingly reminded of his late father. The president's disastrous debate performance a few months later was not a tremendous surprise to Quigley. 'We have to be honest with ourselves that it wasn't just a horrible night,' Quigley told CNN's Kasie Hunt on July 2. A few days later, he became one of the first Democratic officials to call for the president to step down from the ticket. He was reminded of when he'd had to take the car keys from his mother, who was losing her vision. The response was predictable. 'What the fuck are you doing?' one colleague asked him. 'It's too late!' said another. Then-Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota had tried to sound the alarm about all this in 2022, vainly attempting to recruit midwestern governors to challenge the incumbent president in the primaries before ultimately launching his own campaign. Drawing attention to the president's declining acuity was pretty much his only issue. The party apparatus circled around the president like the Praetorian Guard, shielding him from debates and trying to keep Phillips off ballots. Given his lack of traction in polls, Phillips soon disappeared. When Special Counsel Robert Hur, who had been investigating Biden for improperly possessing and sharing classified materials, tried to discuss the president's memory and presentation when explaining his decision not to prosecute, the Democratic Party and White House painted him as a right-wing hack. Journalists who raised the issue were viciously attacked by lawmakers and besmirched on social media. Quigley experienced some of the same treatment. 'If you bring this up publicly, you're just going to hurt him,' one representative told him. 'What difference does it make?' said another. 'He's the candidate no matter what, so everyone should shut up.' 'You're a traitor!' a fellow member of the Illinois delegation told Quigley after he went public. 'It's ageism. You're going to make us lose!' This past March, town halls for both Democratic and Republican elected officials were so packed with angry constituents that some members of Congress opted instead for virtual meetings that were easier to control, or skipped them entirely. Quigley relished chatting with Chicago communities, despite getting earfuls of complaints. He'd been doing it for 47 years, first as an aide to an alderman and then serving on the Cook County Board of Commissioners before his election to the House. But this spring, the vitriol aimed at Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Illinois's own Senator Dick Durbin has been over-the-top. Quigley has never seen anything like it. 'They go back to the original sin,' Quigley said, explaining their anger at Biden's decision to run for a second term. 'They perceive that he was selfish. He couldn't see that he couldn't win.' People appreciated that Quigley was one of the first Democratic officials to publicly call for Biden to step aside. 'But it was too late,' one activist told him. She was angry at the party's leadership, but most of all, at Biden. 'They couldn't let their egos get out of the way,' she said. 'He saved our democracy and then he doomed it again.' Quigley sensed that Democrats were going to be mad for a long time about the refusal of Biden and those around him to acknowledge what was happening to him. What's more, Quigley knew they were right.
