Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called out the New York Times for its double standard in its critical reporting on President Donald Trump’s health compared to how it constantly covered up and made excuses for former President Joe Biden’s struggles.(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images; David Dee Delgado / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders December 3, 2025 at 2:55pm
It was a New York Times event, but this couldn’t have been what the Times had in mind.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blasted the so-called national “newspaper of record” Wednesday for attacking President Donald Trump’s physical fitness for office while reminding his audience of the paper’s shameful covering for former President Joe Biden’s all-too-evident frailties.
And he did it with a New York Times banner hanging right behind him.
WATCH: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls out the New York Times for blatant double standard regarding President Trump’s health, reminding them how they ignored Joe Biden’s mental collapse. pic.twitter.com/dF8x6zqrO7
— The Western Journal (@WesternJournalX) December 3, 2025
The occasion was the DealBook Summit at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, a journalism colloquium featuring newsmakers from around the world.
It was hosted by Aaron Sorkin, a Times columnist and editor of the DealBook financial news service published by the Times.
“You know, in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, The New York Times is no longer the paper of record,” Bessent told Sorkin, according to Mediaite.
“I read this article, like, ‘President Trump is slowing down. President Trump’s mental capacity –’ It is a hundred percent fake. Like, he only called me twice at two in the morning last week instead of three times.”
Bessent was apparently referring to a hatchet job published by The New York Times on Friday with the headline: “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office.”
It was a “report” that was blasted by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who pointed out during a news briefing Monday that one of the authors on the piece published Friday was behind a report in the same newspaper that claimed in 2021 that “Biden is ‘doing 100 percent fine’ after tripping while boarding Air Force One.”
It’s safe to say that many Americans don’t remember Biden doing “fine” in 2021 — and even progressives started to notice in the years that followed as his mental and physical decline became more pronounced.
But The New York Times and the nation’s other legacy news outlets kept up the pretense that there was nothing wrong. The newspaper even went along last year when then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre branded the voluminous videos of Biden’s weakness as simply “cheap fakes.”
Here’s a New York Times headline from June 21, 2024: “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts.”
Bessent’s critique on Wednesday brought all that rushing back.
“You had what was the greatest — one of the greatest scandals of all time,” he told Sorkin. “The coverage of the Biden administration, Joe Biden’s diminished capacity, and the cover-up. Where was The New York Times?”
When Sorkin tried to suggest that it was questions about the Biden coverage before that made questions about Trump’s capacity legitimate now, Bessent brushed him off.
“We just had a three-hour Cabinet meeting yesterday, Andrew,” Bessent said. “For 10 months, the Biden administration did not have a Cabinet meeting …
“I hear from people in the Treasury Building that I see President Trump more in a day than my predecessor saw Joe Biden in half a year.”
For conservatives, the truth about Biden was self-evident going back to 2019 when he announced for the presidency.
For the rest of the country, the dawning came slowly that Biden belonged in a nice, quiet nursing home back in Delaware more than he belonged in D.C., but dawn it did.
It was only in the establishment media, very much including The New York Times, that gaslighting and propaganda persisted on a scale much more befitting a tin-pot Third-World dictatorship than the most powerful, most technologically advanced nation the globe has ever known.
But on Wednesday, on a New York Times stage, under a New York Times banner, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blew the whistle.
And it couldn’t have been what the Times wanted at all.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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