Victor Davis Hanson: Even Biden's supporters 'worried' by news conference

Joe Biden at the Democrats' debate in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020 (MSNBC screenshot)

Joe Biden didn't help his presidential campaign with a recent news conference, the first after some three months of isolation because of the coronavirus pandemic, contends Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

It exchange with reporters Tuesday left supporters of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee "underwhelmed" and "disturbed," Hanson said in an interview Wednesday with Fox News' "The Story."

He pointed to Biden's answer to a question about his mental acuity.

"Almost the first thing he said to a reporter was ... 'you're a dog-faced liar.' And that was something that he should have avoided because before, remember, he said, 'You're a dog-faced pony soldier,'" Hanson said.

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"He was reading the names of the people he was supposed to call and he had these pauses, and this was after almost 90 days," Hanson said. "I'm just reflecting what 20 percent of the Democratic Party stalwarts believe. That he's not cognitively able."

At the news conference in Biden's hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, the Democrat said he can "hardly wait" for opportunities to compare his mental ability to President Trump's.

"I’ve been tested, I’m constantly tested," he said while not providing details.

"Look, all you’ve got to do is watch me, and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against," he said.

Hanson wondered: "Where has he been tested the last 90 days? He could have at least have four or five Skype or Zoom interviews, but he didn't. And you know why he didn't? Because he's not able to ... [in] an impromptu, ad hoc, extempore fashion, to reply to questions in a coherent manner."

Hanson addressed the issue in a National Review commentary.

"Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate," he wrote. "Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity," he said. "I say 'pretext' without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office."

He pointed out Biden often "cannot finish a sentence" and that names "are vague eddies in his mind’s river of forgetfulness."

"He is in a far more dire mental state than a physically failing FDR was in his 1944 campaign for a fourth term."

But Hanson said the "earlier career of a healthy Biden illustrates that he was not especially sharp even when in control of most of his faculties."

"We recall the former sane/nutty Biden of Neal Kinnock plagiarism, his 'put y'all in chains' demagoguery, the studied racism of Biden’s riffs about a 'clean' and well-spoken Obama, and the sane/insane Corn Pop stories," he said. "All are the trademark of a once fool Joe Biden, who was at least alert when compared with his current catalepsy. If Donald Trump can be ungrammatical, Biden is agrammatical — he simply streams together half-thoughts without syntax and then abandons the sentence entirely."

Biden often suffers from "dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is doing or saying or where he is."

Apparently, Hanson said, keeping him "in suspended animation" in his basement has made things worse.

"Seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more Biden 'rests up,' the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse does not make it firmer," he said.

The reality is that Biden, by avoiding the campaign trial, is compressing the campaign into a "late-summer and autumn cycle" that likely will remind people "in the eleventh hour of the campaign that they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency.

"While all Democrats know that the cat must be belled, no one wishes to step forward to do it and remove Biden — and indeed no one knows how to steal a nomination from an enfeebled winner and hand it off to an undeserving but cogent alternative. Take out Biden in August, and who knows what sort of candidate stampede might follow in today’s insane landscape?"

The Daily Caller News Foundation reported a super PAC supporting President Trump released an ad questioning Biden's "mental capacity."

"Does Joe Biden have the mental capacity to keep America safe?” asks a narrator in the ad, titled “Lost His Mind.”

Slated to run on social media and TV nationwide, it was released by the Committee to Defend the President.

"Is Joe Biden in mental decline? Does Joe Biden have dementia?" the narrator asks. "In a world losing its mind, we don’t need a president who’s already lost his."

The ad includes video of several Biden’s gaffes, some of which gained widespread media attention. The former vice president, for instance, appeared to stumble through a CNN interview in April in which he criticized Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"You know, there's — during World War II, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing that, you know, was totally different than a — than — he called it the — you know, World War II, he had the War Production Board," Biden said during the CNN interview while looking down at his notes.

The Committee to Defend the President's chairman, Ted Harvey, said in a press statement about the ad's release: "From the COVID-19 economic shutdown to the Black Lives Matter riots, the world is becoming a more unstable place every day."