Biden deserves the benefit of the Goldwater Rule

President Joe Biden is facing a media feeding frenzy as medical professionals and journalists speculate about his health, with some violating the Goldwater Rule by making unprofessional diagnoses without having examined him.

President Joe Biden is living Donald Trump’s life, including that he is now the target of sloppy and unethical news reporting. 

The press is even trotting out medical professionals to commit spiritual violations of the Goldwater Rule, just as they did for the man Biden defeated in 2020.

How’s that for karma?

Since June 27, when Biden imploded at the first (and presumably last) presidential debate of the 2024 campaign, the ways in which his re-election effort has mirrored Trump’s first campaign are as remarkable as they are eerie. 

The presumptive Democratic nominee faces an intra-party civil war. Competing factions argue over whether they should jettison or stand with him in spite of his clear disqualifications. Members of Congress are releasing mealy-mouthed statements, recognizing his obvious electoral weaknesses and personal unfitness for office but not going so far as to say anything that may jeopardize their political careers.

Party leaders, strategists and donors are meeting behind closed doors to discuss mechanisms by which they might force him from the ticket and, should they succeed, what their next steps would be. Others are debating a too-clever-by-half 11th-hour strategy to replace him at their party convention later this summer. 

Most karmic of all is the news coverage. It has been an all-out feeding frenzy since the debate. Insider “scoops” have become ubiquitous, revealing sobering details of Biden's years-long decline. Together, they suggest that the president’s decline was a well-kept secret, thanks to a multiyear conspiracy involving everyone in the White House.

Although much of the reporting is solid, some of it is also extremely thin, often relying on the say-so of a single anonymous source. Worse still, the press is asking medical experts to pass professional judgments on a man they’ve never personally examined.

“Biden is suffering from dementia, and he is delusional,” said a Fox News medical contributor. “He cannot see his own medical condition and will not step down.”

Elsewhere at the same network, Marty Makary said, “If I put a medical student in front of a patient that was Joe Biden and that student came back and reported that the president had normal cognition and no diagnoses — that student would fail the exam. This is clearly some dementia.”

At NBC News, neurological specialist Mark Pitts had an even blunter assessment, claiming the president is showing “classic features of neurodegeneration.” “I could have diagnosed him from across the mall,” he said.

“His motor symptoms are degenerating,” Pitts added. “He has Parkinson-isms. That is a fact. He has degeneration of the brain. Show me the MRI. Show me he doesn’t. Put your money where your mouth is. He definitely has it.…[Biden] is not a hard case.… Once you start manifesting the hallmark motor symptoms, slow movement, rigidity, masked facies, hypophonia, if a med student did not pick Parkinson’s on the test, they’d be remediated.”

At Newsmax, neurologist Russell Surasky likewise asserted that Biden is suffering from Parkinson's dementia.

Across the pond, the Mirror, a British tabloid, highlighted geriatrician David Jarrett's statement earlier this year: "I look at images of President Biden, and there are certain features that, to me, he looks a little bit Parkinsonian, as if he's got early Parkinson's disease.”

In the Daily Mail, a headline read: “I invented America's gold-standard cognitive test. This is why I'm calling on Biden to take it and make his results public.”

As a reminder, these professionals have yet to examine Biden. Everything they said is based entirely on casual observation. In truth, it is baseless speculation with a side of an appeal to authority.

It’s worthless. It’s also unethical. Indeed, though these remarks may not technically violate the Goldwater Rule, they certainly do so in spirit.

In case you are unfamiliar, the rule came about after a survey of psychiatrists found that nearly 50 percent of respondents believed 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was mentally disturbed. The survey, which was then made public by Fact magazine, quoted licensed psychiatrists who referred to Goldwater as a “dangerous lunatic,” “paranoid” and a “counterfeit figure of a masculine man.” Others alleged he had an “impulsive quality,” that he was “emotionally too unstable,” and that he had a “Godlike self-image.”

The American Psychiatric Association would later refer to the survey as a “very public ethical misstep.” Thus, the Goldwater Rule was born. It holds that psychiatrists are to refrain from offering diagnoses of persons based on nothing more than casual observation. (Psychologists have a similar rule.)

At the heart of the rule is the idea that medical professionals have an ethical duty to avoid passing imprecise judgments. The rule is meant to protect a trusting public from taking as fact the purely speculative (or political) opinions of professionals with impressive honorifics. The rule is also meant to protect the average person from being misdiagnosed.

The professionals who claim with utmost certainty that Biden has Parkinson’s or dementia (or both) despite having never examined the man are engaging in the exact type of behavior the Goldwater Rule was meant to guard against. They haven’t examined Biden. Many of them have probably never been in the same room as Biden. Therefore, they cannot offer professional diagnoses. They simply do not know. 

It was bad when media and psychiatrists unquestionably violated the Goldwater Rule for Trump. What we see now from the press against Biden, this spiritual cousin of the Goldwater Rule, is hardly any better.

Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.