Joe Biden lacks 'mental capacity' to be President, former White House doc Ronny Jackson drops bombshell claim
Former White House physician Ronny Jackson is of the firm opinion that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is not fit for the top office, given his frequent memory slips. The former vice president, 77, made the headlines recently for his gaffes at a rally in Toledo where he said he was running for the Senate and failed to remember the name of Utah Senator Mitt Romney, a former presidential rival to former president Barack Obama. President Donald Trump capitalized on the issue at once to mock his opponent.
Jackson, who served as the chief medical advisor to Trump between February and December 2019, once claimed the current incumbent could live up to 200 years if he took a healthier diet. The 53-year-old, who is also running for the Congress as a member of the Republican Party from Texas, said on Tuesday, October 13, that he believed as a physician that Biden doesn’t have the “mental capacity” or “cognitive ability” to run the country.
“I’m pretty familiar with what it takes both physically and cognitively to do that job and what the demands of that job are,” Jackson told reporters on a call which was organized by the Trump campaign, New York Post reported.
“As a citizen, not as a candidate running for Congress, but as a citizen of this country, I’ve watched Joe Biden on the campaign trail and I am concerned and convinced that he does not have the mental capacity, the cognitive ability, to serve as our commander-in-chief and our head of state,” he added.
Jackson concerned with Biden getting angry over his gaffe
Jackson also said that he was concerned by the way Biden became visibly frustrated or angry when he got lost in the middle of a sentence. “As a physician I can tell you that’s a mechanism that folks that are having cognitive difficulties use to move on and to get out of a situation,” Jackson added. He, however, clarified that he was not criticizing Biden because of his age and added that some people nearing 100 could be as still “as sharp as a tack”. Biden, he said, did not belong to that group.
“This is a demanding job from a cognitive standpoint, you have to be locked on, you have to be articulate, you have to process lots and lots of information and multitask,” the former White House doctor added.
A former Navy rear admiral, Jackson started his stint in the White House medical unit under former president George W Bush and was appointed as the physician to the president under Obama in 2013 and continued under Trump till 2018 before taking over the role of the chief medical advisor to the commander-in-chief. In between, he was nominated to serve as the secretary of veteran affairs in March 2018 but withdrew it in the wake of allegations of misconduct, including drinking on the job. He denied the charges.
On his opinion on Biden’s health, Jackson said during the call that he was not making a medical assessment of the former vice president and that he never took care of the latter when the Obama administration was in control. He also said that he did not evaluate him as a patient ever. “I’m not trying to remotely diagnose him with anything. I’ve not accused him of having Alzheimer’s or anything of that nature,” Jackson said.
Last month, Biden’s former White House stenographer said the former has “lost a step” and is not as mentally sharp as he was four years earlier. “It is a complete difference from what he was in 2017,” Mike McCormick, who worked with Biden from 2011 to 2017, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Biden’s campaign, however, has fought the allegations that Biden lacks mental fitness to be the president. The former vice president, who dubbed himself as a “gaffe machine” in the past but defended himself saying his gaffes have not been about substantive issues, however, was praised by even some Trump supporters for his show in the first presidential debate in Ohio last month.