Former Fox News contributor and psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow wasn’t surprised that Joe Biden froze up during his disastrous debate with President Trump last year – after controversially suggesting more than a decade earlier that the former president was showing signs of dementia.
Ablow, in an interview with “Pod Force One” host Miranda Devine, explained that his “instinct” told him there was something amiss with Biden as far back as 2012, when he went up against Republican Paul Ryan in a vice presidential debate marked by Biden’s “arresting” laughter and constant interruptions.
“One of the benefits of being a psychiatrist is you learn to listen to yourself as you’re listening to others, so you don’t just have things roll over you,” explained the doctor, who went on to treat Biden’s son Hunter years later.
“You tend to say, ‘Well, why am I uncomfortable with this? Why am I having a strange feeling about it?’ My feeling at the time listening to Joe Biden was, ‘This feels like a staccato performance. It feels brittle to me’, and not just because he was debating and he has a habit, let’s say, of interrupting, but because the interruptions seemed too frequent and inelegant during that debate, and I felt like his laughter was also arresting. It didn’t seem to me to be appropriate,” Ablow recalled thinking as he watched Biden debate Ryan.
“And so, I thought, well, what could be an explanation for that? And I went on Fox News and said, ‘Well, one explanation – I haven’t interviewed this man, I’m not diagnosing him – but some folks who have that kind of behavior … have an element of dementia,’” he added.
The remark, made by Ablow on “Fox & Friends,” drew scorn at the time from left-wing media outlets and the likes of “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.
“I may have been the first one in the country to say, ‘Maybe [Biden] has an element of memory loss here.’”
“That was my instinct,” he added.
Ablow explained that he first broached the subject of Biden showing signs of mental deterioration during a post-debate meeting with Roger Ailes, the late chairman of Fox News, who encouraged him to think about saying it on the air.
“I went to Roger Ailes’ office. It happened to be after that debate. We just happened to be meeting, and he said, ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a little worried that he could be suffering an impairment.’ And he said, ‘Well, maybe you’d want to say that, or think about it,’” the psychiatrist recounted.
Ablow acknowledged that Biden, now 82, is known to use “laughter as a weapon,” but said at the time of his debate with Ryan, his chuckling seemed “misguided.”
The doctor then suggested that Biden’s halting debate performance against Trump 12 years later was “perhaps a continuing degree of the same kind of cognitive issues.”
“I wouldn’t know exactly, but it wasn’t surprising to me, because I saw it way back.”
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