Former White House physician Ronny Jackson told reporters Tuesday he was “convinced” that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, 77, does not have the cognitive ability to be commander-in-chief.
“I’m pretty familiar with what it takes both physically and cognitively to do that job and what the demands of that job are,” Jackson, 53, who is currently running for Congress as a Republican, said on a call organized by the Trump campaign.
“As a citizen, not as a candidate running for Congress, but as a citizen of this country, I’ve watched Joe Biden on the campaign trail and I am concerned and convinced that he does not have the mental capacity, the cognitive ability, to serve as our commander-in-chief and our head of state,” he went on.
Jackson served in the White House medical unit under President George W. Bush and was appointed physician to the president under President Barack Obama and President Trump before he was nominated to serve as secretary of veterans affairs in March 2018.
The Navy rear admiral, who famously declared that Trump could live to 200 years old, was forced to withdraw his nomination after allegations of misconduct including drinking on the job and overprescribing drugs — charges he vehemently denied.
Jackson insisted he wasn’t providing a medical assessment on the call and told reporters he never took care of Biden while he was Obama’s vice president or evaluated him as a patient.
“I’m not trying to remotely diagnose him with anything,” he said. “I’ve not accused him of having Alzheimer’s or anything of that nature.”
Biden’s campaign has swatted away allegations that Biden lacks the mental acuity to be president, while the septuagenarian candidate, who suffers from frequent verbal fumbles, has described himself as “a gaffe machine.”
“I refer you to the first debate,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates told The Post on Tuesday, referring to the shambolic Ohio showdown in which Trump frequently spoke over Biden.
But Jackson claimed Biden’s history of gaffes was different from the behavior he now displays on the campaign trail — including repeatedly claiming to be a candidate for the Senate.
“They’re not the typical gaffes. He routinely gets in the middle of a thought and then loses his train of thought and then he can’t recalibrate where he’s at. He’s actually having a lot of trouble recently articulating words,” he said.
Jackson said he was also concerned by the way Biden became visibly frustrated or angry when he got lost mid-sentence.
“As a physician, I can tell you that’s a mechanism that folks that are having cognitive difficulties use to move on and to get out of a situation,” he claimed.
The physician said he wasn’t criticizing Biden because of his advanced age and that while some people approaching 100 could still be as sharp as a tack, Biden was not.
“This is a demanding job from a cognitive standpoint, you have to be locked on, you have to be articulate, you have to process lots and lots of information and multitask,” Jackson said.
“And right now he’s having a really extreme time just focusing on the one task at hand that he has when he stands up in front of voters and tries to explain something,” he added.
Also on the call was former Trump deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, who told reporters: “I’ve known Joe Biden for a long time and he’s a nice man but he’s not a strong man.”
McFarland sounded the alarm over what she said would be national security risks from a Biden administration, speculating the former veep would not be able to hold his own when negotiating with America’s adversaries abroad.
“I don’t see that Vice President Biden either appreciates how the world has changed over the past 10 years with China and its ambitions and its capabilities, or his willingness to stand up to them since he’s so dismissive of China as a threat,” she said.