Bob Costas: ‘We can no longer indulge [President Biden’s] delusions’

As President Joe Biden refuses to quit his campaign for a second term, Bob Costas asked whether the American public has been gaslit by Democrats.

In February, Costas joined CNN’s Michael Smerconish and called for Biden to recognize the best interests of his political party and his country by dropping out of the race. Five months later, many have began to share Costas’s sentiment after witnessing Biden’s underwhelming debate performance against Donald Trump. But during his latest appearance with Smerconish on CNN, Costas noted it shouldn’t have taken Biden’s disastrous debate for Democrats to begin acknowledging his decline.

“Biden had a chance to be seen by history as a statesman and a patriot. He spared the nation a second Trump term, he could have gone out in a gracious fashion. Now, we can no longer indulge his delusions.” – Bob Costas pic.twitter.com/1JcjAe1jXB

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) July 15, 2024

“That one atrocious night was simply writ-large what could be seen for years and years, that he is in serious decline,” Costas said on CNN. “Nobody should be president when they‘re 85 or 86, including the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, but this guy is clearly in decline at this point. And part of the job, leaving aside whether he can do it for the next four years, is winning the job. And as you just laid out, that seems to be nearly impossible at this point.”

“Biden had a chance to be seen by history as a statesman and a patriot. He spared the nation a second Trump term, he could have gone out in a gracious fashion,” Costas continued. “Now, we can no longer indulge his delusions.”

Smerconish noted the calls for Biden to step down wouldn’t be so widespread if the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle was held in September, as is typical, instead of June.

“This has been so overwhelmingly obvious for so long,” Costas said of Biden’s decline. “You don’t need a degree in public policy from Harvard to see it and to say it – if you’re willing to say it – anymore than you need a degree from MIT to say two plus two is four.

“And it makes you wonder whether we’ve been gaslit by the Democrats. The Republicans major in gaslighting everybody with Trump as their standard-bearer, but this had to have been obvious to people surrounding the president, people who observed the president. Wouldn’t it have been an act of patriotism, if that’s not too overblown a word in this case, to lay that out before the American public?”

Biden’s decline had to have been obvious to people in recent months and years, although many attempted to overlook it, believing an aging president was still the better option than Trump. But his debate performance last month against Trump forced even Biden’s biggest supporters to begin publicly acknowledging the regression.

[CNN]