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Altered State of the Union: Floundering right claims Biden must have been on drugs [1]

['Written By']

Date: 2024-03

President Joe Biden’s fiery Thursday night State of the Union speech was bad news for the preferred narrative from pro-Trump commentators that Biden is a dementia patient on the brink of death. So they responded by baselessly claiming he must have been on performance-enhancing drugs.

The right has sought to leverage Biden’s age, stutter, and well-known tendency to make verbal gaffes since his 2020 presidential campaign. Republican Party operatives promote out-of-context snippets featuring his miscues, which are then amplified by the right-wing media megaphone and leak into the mainstream press. Fox News and its rivals depict the president as an addled old man whose reelection campaign constitutes elder abuse.

That portrayal crashed and burned on Thursday night, with news outlets describing Biden as making “a forceful case” during a “feisty,” “scrappy,” “energetic” “stemwinder” that may have “reset the 2024 campaign.” As it became clear that no one would buy this speech as evidence that Biden is too old to be president, you could see the right settle in real time on an alternate, evidence-free narrative: Biden was on drugs.

Fox anchor Julie Banderas provided a case study in this progression. As Biden prepared to begin his speech at 9:21 p.m., she posted that she was watching the speech “from bed. Didn’t need to a take a Melatonin tonight, this should do it.” By 9:45 p.m., with her preferred narrative dead, she grasped for a new one and alleged that Biden was on cocaine: “I think I just got to the bottom of the untraceable little baggie found at the White House.”

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[1] Url: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/altered-state-union-floundering-right-claims-biden-must-have-been-drugs

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