Glenn Greenwald: Democrats ‘petrified’ of Biden 2024 run with president’s ‘palpable’ decline
Glenn Greenwald speaks to Fox News Digital about the 2024 political landscape and the media’s coverage of President Biden.
The legacy media has taken a hostile turn against President Biden in recent months between questioning his fitness and casting doubt on a re-election bid, but independent journalist Glenn Greenwald believes news organizations do not necessarily want to take him down ahead of 2024 but rather Democrats themselves.
"The concerns about his cognitive decline emanated not from supporters of Bernie Sanders nor from supporters of Donald Trump, they came from these kinds of inside DC strategists and operatives who in 2019 were petrified that Biden would win the Democratic nomination basically by inertia—through name recognition, from having been Obama's vice president. And they were deeply worried that he was not capable of sustaining the rigors of a campaign. And they were the ones sounding the alarm in 2019 that he's not the same Joe Biden," Greenwald told Fox News in an interview last week. "And he ended up winning despite that and never had to test himself with the rigors of the campaign things to the COVID pandemic where he got to basically just speak from his basement and speak to a few friendly interviewers. So we'll never have known whether that they were right. They're the ones who are concerned about it."
"And you know, we're now three or four years later and the decline is palpable. I mean, you know, everyone who has a grandparent recognizes what's going on with Joe Biden, on top of which they're likely to get destroyed in the 2022 midterm election because he's become the single most unpopular president in post-World War Two history for a first-term midterm president. So obviously, Democrats are petrified that he's going to try and run again and clear the field," Greenwald continued.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald speaks at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas on July 13, 2022. (Fox News Digital)
Greenwald, who spoke last week at the libertarian FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, accused Democrats of trying to "sabotage" Biden's ability to run again through an "endless stream of leaks" and reviving the Hunter Biden scandal that they previously dismissed during the 2020 presidential election.
"There's clearly a concerted effort not from Republicans but from Democrats to undermine Joe Biden. And obviously, it's because they fear that he is going to try and run again," Greenwald said.
The prominent Substack writer told Fox News that the media doesn't have a particular motive to oust Biden from the top of the Democratic ticket other than to "serve the interests of their sources," who he noted are "typically Democratic operatives" and that they and various news organizations are in the same "ecosystem" with one shared message about the president.
Regarding the media's about-face with the Hunter Biden laptop, Greenwald insisted news organizations are trying to "subtly correct the record" after they committed what he believes was "one of the gravest media frauds in decades" by dismissing the scandal as Russian disinformation. He then knocked outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post for having "decreed" that the laptop is only now verifiable, implying it wasn't in 2020.
Ultimately, though, it's "open season on Joe Biden."
"I think you saw that with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was the start of the decline of his approval ratings and his problems with the media, and it's clearly accelerated. Whether they're willing to go so far as to admit that there were at least corrupt intentions if not actions on Joe Biden's part of these deals being pursued in Ukraine, in China, that may be a bridge too far for immediate that still wants to maintain this idea of the Democratic Party is heads and shoulders above Republicans in questions of integrity and ethics... But clearly, there's an attempt to correct what they did in a way that reflects least poorly on the lies they told," Greenwald said.
Hunter Biden poses for a picture alongside his father, President Biden. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
Greenwald called it "fascinating" that there's been "no mention" of Vice President Kamala Harris as a possible standard-bearer for Democrats in 2024, claiming he can't think of anyone more "politically inept and unlikable" other than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"Everything she touches just immediately crumbles and turns to crap, she's getting worse by the day, not better. And there's just nobody I think on the horizon that the media has confidence in can be formidable, which is why at the moment what they're in is not some planning mode but full-on panic," Greenwald told Fox News.
While he asserted that the media is rather indifferent about Biden's reelection bid, Greenwald insisted the press is "obviously" "desperate for Trump to run."
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"They were on the verge of all losing their jobs," Greenwald exclaimed. "Every person I know who worked in cable news—not at Fox—in 2015 was an inch away from getting a termination notice until Donald Trump came and saved all of their jobs. And he didn't just save their jobs, but he enabled them to become celebrities and write books and become very wealthy. All of these groups like the Lincoln Project and the ACLU—all of their gigantic budgets and huge, inflated salaries depend upon everyone being petrified of but also very kind of interested in the spectacle that is Donald Trump."
"Whatever else you think of him, he is someone that people can't take their eyes off of. He's a media spectacle. And without him, you see them returning to their pre-Trump stage of just this, like, irrelevant dormancy where no one has any interest in them. So the people who are on their hands and knees every night praying for Donald Trump's return are not MAGA-adherence who are just fine if you replace Donald Trump with somebody who also believes in the America First ideology, it's the columnist of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the people and activist groups who've gotten very rich by scaring everyone out of Trump and most of all, the hosts of CNN and MSNBC," he continued.
Former President Trump continues to tease another run for the White House in 2024, something Glenn Greenwald insists the media desperately wants to happen. (Getty Images)
Greenwald also called out how the media, which portrayed Trump as a "sort of once-in-a-lifetime Hitler-like menace to American democracy," is now sounding a similar alarm towards Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been widely buzzed as a potential 2024 candidate.
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"We're already now seeing the emergence of this extremely predictable narrative that 'oh, well compared to DeSantis. Trump is basically like this benign figure because he was really basically too lazy and too undisciplined to ever do any real damage. It's Ron DeSantis who's the serious threat,'" Greenwald mocked the media. "So now suddenly, the once-in-a-lifetime Hitler figure has been replaced by someone we're supposed to believe is even more dangerous, even though Ron DeSantis is nothing more—he's like Mike Pompeo, just somebody who's a very standard run-of-the-mill, Republican conservative who may be modified on the margin some of his rhetorical expressions to accommodate the kind of new sensibility that Donald Trump ushered in. But there's so much of the media ecosystem that depends upon the argument that the Republican Party has become this fascist dictatorial regime that no matter who Trump is replaced by in terms of leaving the Republican Party, they're just gonna immediately transfer that same narrative to that person."
"And Trump will be thought of by, you know, by 2026 the way George W. Bush is now—this sort of like nice old man who sure, we had some disagreements, but never really was quite dangerous the way this new one is. And you're already seeing that," he added.
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