Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks is using her credentials as a doctor to boost a conspiracy theory the Trump campaign is circulating to explain why President Biden may appear more intelligent, articulate and better informed than Trump in their first debate on Thursday: If Biden performs well, it’s because he’s on performance-enhancing drugs. The Trump campaign stories also assert that the media is aware of this, but is covering it up.
The Trump campaign first started pushing these nonsense claims months ago, but recently as the debate approaches the frequency and volume of conspiracy-mongering has increased.
“They want to get him good and strong, so a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass,” Trump said during his rally in Philadelphia on Saturday. “They want to strengthen him up. So he comes out, he’ll come out, OK, I say he’ll come out all jacked up. Right? All jacked up.”
Appearing on The Evening Edit on Fox Business on Monday, Miller-Meeks presented a slightly more polite version of Trump’s claim.
“So, we anticipate that for this first debate, he will be ‘on’ something,” Miller-Meeks told host Elizabeth MacDonald. “And the response of the press has been to cover it up.”
According to Miller-Meeks, it wouldn’t be the first time Biden has been drugged in public. The representative from Iowa’s 1st District claimed the president “was obviously on stimulants or something or other.”
Miller-Meeks said the president was being doped (“some type of stimulant, whether it was ritalin or steroids or something else”) to “hide the fact that he has cognitive decline.”
Normally, doctors are reluctant to attempt to diagnose someone they haven’t examined, reluctant to speculate on subjects outside their area of expertise, and most consider it violation of professional ethics to publicly diagnose someone who isn’t their patient. Not Miller-Meeks.
The two-term representative is an ophthalmologist, but started her comments about Biden’s mental state by assuring Fox viewers that she can diagnose cognitive problems even if she’s only seen someone across a room.
“Well, first and foremost, let me say that as an ophthalmologist, I deal mostly with elderly patients,” Miller-Meeks said. “Number two, my mother had Alzheimer’s and I took care of her for the majority of the last few years of her life. And number three, I’ve been to the White House several times for bill signings and all of us have seen the degradation of President Biden’s cognitive facilities.”
Miller-Meeks agreed with Fox’s MacDonald that the media is covering up Biden’s mental state because it has been bullied into submission by the White House. Miller-Meeks referred to the White House pushing back against deceptively edited videos of Biden being circulated online as evidence of the bullying campaign.
Miller-Meeks is still a believer in those videos.
“We’ve seen the embarrassment at the G-7 summit and in Normandy, where he turns away, looks a different way,” she said. “And then they tried to cover that up by saying he was turning around to look at veterans.”
Oddly, Miller-Meeks chose the two most thoroughly debunked videos to make her case.
The video from the G-7 “shows Biden walking away from the leaders and toward a group of parachutists who had just landed, giving them two thumbs-up,” as NBC explained. “But conservative media outlets and the Republican National Committee posted videos shot from angles that cut out the parachutists” to create the impression Biden had aimlessly wandered off.
The Normandy video Miller-Meeks referenced was also created by deceptive editing to make Biden look incompetent, as multiple fact-checks documented.
The Fox Business host did not correct Miller-Meeks, of course. MacDonald did start Miller-Meeks’ segment by thanking her for appearing on The Evening Edit during a difficult time in Iowa.
“We appreciate you taking the time, given your dealing with massive flooding in your home state of Iowa, but congresswoman, we need your assessment also as a doctor on this new controversy now blowing up,” MacDonald said. The “new controversy” is no one taking fringe Republican demands “that President Biden take a drug test before and after the CNN presidential debate to see if Biden is taking any stimulants or drugs” more seriously.
Miller-Meeks did not directly address the idea of drug-testing the president. She also never mentioned the flooding in Iowa.
