Geraldo Rivera on Tuesday took issue with Sean Hannity’s portrayal of President Joe Biden as mentally in decline, calling the Fox News host’s video montage of the president and its implication “deeply insulting and highly political.”
As he has in recent broadcasts, Hannity made it clear to viewers that he seriously doubts whether Biden is fit for the job. After contrasting clips of Biden in past decades with a GOP ad designed to draw attention to his pauses during a press conference earlier this month, Hannity said he found the difference to be “humiliating for our country.”
“Here’s an obvious question that no one in the media mob will dare ask: Does Joe Biden have the mental strength and capacity to serve as the president of the United States?” Hannity said. “It appears to me to be very transparent, very obvious, very clear… that Joe Biden is in a steep cognitive decline. It seems to be accelerating to me.”
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Later in his show, Hannity brought on two doctors to discuss the matter. But first he invited on two non-doctors who apparently took precedence: Geraldo Rivera and Dan Bongino.
Although Hannity’s portrayal of Biden centered around an explicitly political video, the fact that Rivera called it “highly political” didn’t sit well with Bongino, who called Rivera the “designated leftist hack” for the purposes of the primetime segment.
“The evidence of the man’s problems with his cognitive process to retrieve information are not weekly, they are not monthly—they are literally daily. He can’t retrieve information. It is one of the basic symptoms of a frontal lobe-type dementia or the various categories of dementia we see out there,” Bongino concluded. “Admit the guy is cognitively compromised, drop the loss, and let’s move on. It is a dying argument.”
Rivera responded that Bongino was being “shocking and outrageous” and said his “medical diagnosis” was inappropriate. Hannity objected to that label, claiming Bongino’s line about a specific form of dementia didn’t amount to a diagnosis but was merely an “obvious observation.”
Later in the conversation, Rivera claimed Bongino’s comments were designed to prime the waters for discussion of the 25th Amendment, which outlines steps for the president’s removal from office.
“That’s what you want to bring up here, just like they attacked Trump on the 25th Amendment,” Rivera said. “You want to make the case that [Biden] can be replaced.”
“I didn’t bring that up,” Bongino replied. “You brought that up.”
Rivera’s comments Tuesday night were similar to those he made on Fox airwaves earlier in the day. Appearing on The Five, he asked Dana Perino whether “the hit on Biden about his alleged senility and losing his cognitive decline” is “a little much.” The former Bush administration official sidestepped the question, saying she doesn’t make those types of remarks.
