The Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once remarked that “men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” The line (a version of which is often misattributed to Winston Churchill) could hardly fit President Biden better. But it would also be more than a little misleading. The truth is that for months, if not years, the president, his family, and his senior advisers deceived the country about the extent of his mental deterioration. Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman, first saw it back in 2021, when Biden went to Capitol Hill and “had trouble articulating his own agenda,” as The Times’s Peter Baker noted this week. Phillips’s Democratic colleagues saw it, too, but said nothing.

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Persons: Abba Eban, Winston Churchill, Biden, “, ”, selflessness he’s, Dean Phillips, Peter Baker, Phillips’s Organizations: Minnesota congressman, Capitol, Phillips’s Democratic Locations: Minnesota