Biden’s latest on-camera appearance sparks concerns about his declining health

President Joe Biden sputtered his way through a nine-minute performance on St. Croix on Sunday night to pay tribute to the late President Jimmy Carter.

Biden’s coughing and slow delivery reinforced concerns about the 82-year-old president’s declining cognitive skills.

The president’s health is in the news again since the publication of The Wall Street Journal a Dec. 19 story about how aides dealt with a “reduced” president throughout his term.

The report found that aides would have to repeat clear instructions to Biden — such as where to leave a stage.

President-elect Donald Trump often mocked Biden for getting lost at his own rallies on the 2024 campaign trail.

The Journal also said that Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who co-chaired Biden’s doomed 2024 campaign, had been tasked with finding the president a voice coach to improve his “fading singing,” as the newspaper put it.

The fading chatter became fully apparent during Biden’s remarks to the traveling press about Carter’s death Sunday night.

As Biden’s term comes to an end, experts and journalists are questioning whether media coverage of the president properly investigated what the White House said about his health.

DailyMail.com has chronicled the president’s frequent stumbles and stumbles throughout Biden’s presidency, which should have served as a clue that something was going wrong.

But most Americans — and even a former White House aide — were shocked by Biden’s poor performance in the late June presidential debate in Atlanta against Trump, the event that — less than a month later — prompted the Democrat to resign crochet.

Biden’s successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, would lose the presidential election.

On Fox News, guest Cal Thomas said Sunday that journalists were the biggest losers of 2024 for “covering up” the president’s condition.

“They covered up the decline in Biden’s mental acuity,” Thomas railed.

He also blasted journalists for not taking the Hunter Biden laptop seriously — which DailyMail.com authenticated — instead believing the 50-plus intelligence officials who claimed the laptop was Russian disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.

“The media was following all of this,” Thomas said. ‘And I think it is a shame for the profession that I have been part of for half a century. And I would like us to get some new blood in the media to actually practice journalism instead of politics.”

CBS chief correspondent Jan Crawford also criticized the media for failing to cover Biden’s decline.

Biden’s coughing and slow delivery reinforced concerns about the 82-year-old president’s declining cognitive skills

During a roundtable discussion on Sunday’s Face the Nation, she was asked what the most under-covered story of 2024 was.

“That to me would be Joe Biden’s clear cognitive decline that became undeniable in a televised debate,” she responded. ‘Undisputed.’

“It’s now becoming clear that his advisers had been more or less cooperating with his restrictions for four years, which were reported in The Wall Street Journal,” Crawford continued.

At the same time, she noted that Biden “insisted he could still run for president.”

“We should have asked much more vigorously whether he would be fit for office for four more years, which could have led to a Democratic primary,” Crawford noted. “It could have changed the scope of the entire election.”

Self-help guru Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips were among the Democrats taking on Biden, with Phillips specifically warning of polls showing real wariness about electing someone the president’s age to another four-year term.

But other Democrats with presidential ambitions shunned the aging commander-in-chief, giving him an easy path to the 2024 nomination.

Crawford then pointed to a more recent report in which The Washington Post quoted aides as saying Biden believed he could have defeated Trump had he stayed in the race.

“Yet incredibly, we read in The Washington Post that his advisers are saying that he regrets dropping out of the race, that he thinks he could have defeated Trump,” Crawford said. “And I think that’s either a delusion or they’re screwing the American people.”

The White House continues to insist that Biden’s cognitive health is excellent.

Spokesman Andrew Bates declined to substantiate the Journal’s reporting and instead touted that Biden “has achieved the most accomplished record of any modern commander in chief and rebuilt the middle class because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of lives.” ‘

White House spokespeople have also pointed to the president’s childhood stutter and blamed his disastrous debate performance on Biden having a cold.