What a difference a year makes.
Former President Joe Biden was snapped struggling to set up a beach chair Thursday before catching some rays with family near his son Hunter’s home in Malibu, Calif., to kick off his first Independence Day weekend since leaving office.
The ex-commander-in-chief — who took more vacation days than any modern US president — looked right at home lounging under a red umbrella with former first lady Jill Biden, while granddaughter Finnegan and grandson Beau Biden Jr. frolicked in the sand nearby.
At least 577 days of Biden’s 1,463-day term were spent vacationing — including luxurious stays at St. Croix and Nantucket as well as family getaways at Rehoboth Beach, Del.
During his trips away from Washington, viral videos of the 46th president stumbling while walking across the sand and taking a tumble off his bike gave ammo to critics calling out his mental and physical decline.
Thursday’s photos show the 82-year-old former Delaware senator and vice president happily shaking sand from his towel while wearing his signature aviator sunglasses and presidential baseball cap, before packing up.
Onlookers later spotted the elder Biden dining with Hunter at his favorite sushi joint Nobu later on Thursday after having given a keynote address at a human resources conference in San Diego earlier this week.
“I do not want you to miss any important family obligations for work,” the ex-president told the Society for Human Resource Management of his instructions to White House staff.
“There are moments we’ll never get back,” the former president warned attendees.
The Malibu beach trip took place one year and six days after Biden’s halting and at times incoherent debate performance against Donald Trump that ultimately forced him from the 2024 race.
Since then, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have launched investigations to determine whether Biden was compos mentis while in office — or if aides were pulling the strings.
Several lines of inquiry are focused on which Biden advisers were authorized to use the presidential autopen, a mechanical device that signs executive actions and pardons.
Critics of the last administration have speculated that some pardons in the final weeks of the Biden administration may have been approved via autopen — and without the president’s full knowledge.
Washington, DC, journalists have also spilled metric tons ink on the Biden cognition question, with CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson penning a book on the 2024 cycle that claimed a massive cover-up by top White House aides hid the president’s diminishing mental acuity from the public.
“You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk and I can beat the hell out of both of them,” Biden shot back May 30 in reference to the “Original Sin” co-authors just weeks after the book was published.
“I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” the ex-president also said in a June statement responding to the Trump administration and congressional probes.
Biden’s personal physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, is scheduled to be deposed by the House Oversight Committee over the matter on July 9 — and will also likely face questions about the president’s recent prostate cancer diagnosis.
During his four-year term, Biden never released the results of any cognitive tests or PSA screenings, the latter of which would have shown the cancer before it metastasized.
