Elder Abuse Is a Crime—Yet We’re All Watching It Happen to Joe Biden

In 1892, Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, wrote a poem called “Two Loves” which referred euphemistically to “the love that dare not speak its name.” At that time, homosexuals were expected to keep their sexual orientation and relationships secret. In 1986, Norman Podhoretz published a groundbreaking essay in Commentary Magazine called “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” which put the subject of antisemitism in American journalism on the public radar.

Now it’s time for America to confront the Abuse That Dare Not Speak Its Name: elder abuse. And the victim is none other than President Joe Biden.

Recent reports confirm what’s obvious to everyone on the planet: President Joe Biden is a frail 81-year old who requires physiotherapy daily for his increasingly stiff gait and must wear slip proof sneakers to prevent frequent falls. Staff reportedly can only schedule important meetings for him from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, because that is when he is most lucid.

This is a pattern in keeping with many dementia patients, as are other symptoms: Rarely does a day go by without video of Biden looking completely confused. He also frequently shouts angrily at reporters and confuses things, like Mexico and Egypt, or the names of dead leaders with current ones.

It’s increasingly alarming, and the general consensus in America and around the world is that Biden is both too old for the job and not well.

In most normal families, a frail 81-year-old grandfather insisting on working but showing clear signs of diminished mental capacity and repeated episodes of falling and physical fragility would be encouraged to quit, enjoy his retirement, golf and garden to his heart’s content. Quit your day job, Gramps, they would rightly say. And it’s not like the Biden family is strapped for cash. Aside from any potential extended family business earnings, Joe Biden himself is reported to be worth approximately $10 million.

President Joe Biden faces a clear and present physical danger to his person due to his decline. But the public spectacle of his enfeebled nature also begs a different question: Why is the First Lady not putting an end to her husband’s repeated and consistent public humiliation? Why aren’t his children or grandchildren doing the right thing for their loved one?

President Biden needs an intervention.

Obviously, if the Bidens were a regular American family, the management of the care of a fragile senior citizen would be a strictly personal matter, although fortunately, most states in America have duty to report laws for elder abuse that are similar in many ways to reporting requirements for suspicion of child abuse. But America has become a place where not everyone is equal under the law. Tragically, enforcement of the law depends upon your political stripe.

There can be no argument that a significantly diminished senior is sitting in the White House.

If insisting on keeping a frail and doddering senior in the White House (or any job for that matter), exposing him to daily physical risk, demanding he perform tasks beyond his mental and physical capacity or stamina and world ridicule isn’t elder abuse, what is? Are there any adults in the Biden family “room” who will finally call a lid not just on the President’s repeated public humiliations but on his tenure writ large?

The leader of the free world is now an actual physical representation of the decline of American power and the American Republic. The President’s diminished capacity is being willfully and purposely ignored by those closest to him, something that is very well-appreciated by America’s enemies. As a result, the world is in chaos.

So much of America is divided on partisan lines. Elder abuse, like child abuse, should be a non-partisan issue. It’s well past time for those who love Joe Biden to call it a lid.

Laura Rosen Cohen is a Toronto-based writer.

The views in this article are the writer’s own.