After Thursday’s Debate, Conservative Media Finds It Hard Not to Gloat

In the hours after last week’s presidential debate, a video clip began circulating that featured Jill Biden gingerly helping her husband step down from the event’s stage.

The snippet spread quickly on conservative media, along with an emerging narrative about President Biden’s weak performance: That the debate was a sweeping validation of the alarm bells they’d been ringing for years about his age.

Since well before he took office, pundits on the right have argued repeatedly that Mr. Biden, now 81, was too feeble for the job, playing up videos of him falling off a bike, tripping onstage or stumbling over words during speeches.

On the occasions when Mr. Biden has outperformed expectations — such as March’s State of the Union address — conservative critics have hinted that he must have been using a performance enhancing substance or, as former President Donald J. Trump bluntly put it in speeches leading up to last week’s debate, “jacked up” on drugs.

But after Mr. Biden’s performance Thursday, before an audience of 51 million people, concerns about the president’s fitness became widespread. For many media voices on the right, it appeared, it was hard not to gloat.

“The media woke up yesterday,” Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News host, said on Friday morning. “They couldn’t believe how bad Joe Biden did. Why are they just realizing it?”