Ahead of the first big showdown between Donald Trump and Joe Biden at the debate this week, the Trump campaign’s attacks on Biden are getting a big boost from the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
A pool reporter for Russian President Vladimir Putin and several popular pro-Kremlin outlets claimed on Thursday that the “top news” for the week included, among other things, that Biden “could not get into a car on his own”—a claim made by none other than the Trump campaign.
“Crooked Joe Biden—who is hardly ambulatory at this point—had a really hard time getting into the SUV,” the Trump War Room account wrote on X, accompanied by a brief video of Biden departing a fundraiser on Tuesday night. While the clip did show Biden pause for several moments before climbing into the vehicle, it was not clear if something was going on inside the SUV to make him wait outside it.
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Similar videos that circulated earlier among Trump supporters sparked viral claims that Biden, 81, had pooped himself; that he’d “wandered off” in a state of confusion at the G7 summit; and that he had to be “led off” stage at a fundraiser after freezing up. Full-length footage from all these events later revealed that none of these things had actually happened, and the viral clips had simply omitted key context.
But Moscow has nonetheless continued to carry the torch for the Trump campaign.
“Biden is already dying,” one pro-Kremlin newspaper declared, citing the conservative outlet The Federalist. The Putin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed he’s on the “verge of a catastrophic diagnosis,” quoting a Russian gerontologist who said “poorly qualified” White House doctors are drugging up the aging president.
While Biden, as the oldest sitting American president in history, has understandably come under scrutiny over his age, Trump, at just three years younger, has made his own frequent gaffes and at times appeared to lose his train of thought while speaking at his rallies. His blunders have not been covered by Kremlin media, however, even though his attacks on Biden are routinely shared almost instantly by Moscow’s sprawling network of pro-Kremlin bloggers.
Trump’s claim, for instance, that Biden will be “all jacked up” on drugs for their first debate was not just hyped by Russian media, but reinforced. “Trump has reason to fear that Biden will enter the debate pumped up with medications,” one political analyst was quoted telling a popular weekly newspaper this week, arguing that the U.S. president “much of the time behaves like a vegetable.”
Trump’s claims, he said, “look like the truth.”
Another outlet cited an “expert” claiming Biden is being fed stimulants, which is why he is both “cheerful” and “quite aggressive” at times. “A balance has not yet been found between aggression and the state of a vegetable, but the entire democratic pharmaceutical industry is now working on this and trying to ensure that Biden reaches the elections,” he claimed.
Things got weirder still with a bizarre conspiracy theory pushed by Putin-loving Tsargrad TV that President Joe Biden is not actually Joe Biden, but a mysterious “impersonator.” “More and more, U.S. residents are beginning to doubt that their President Joe Biden is real,” the outlet claimed, citing conspiracy theorists on social media.
The fact that Biden’s appearance and signature changed over the years was touted as proof of something sinister. “Judging by various photographs, the President of the United States’ earlobes, chin, teeth, wrinkles and skin texture have transformed. And the funniest thing is that he even changed the writing of his signature.”
