A recent article in New York Magazine, published on Thursday, portrays President Biden’s perceived cognitive decline as a “dark family secret” among his elite supporters, highlighting instances such as his forgetting the names of longtime friends.

The article, written by Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi, titled, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” is based on months of interviews and has generated significant discussion on social media. The piece comes in the wake of Biden’s poorly received performance in last week’s debate, which has intensified scrutiny over his fitness to serve.

Nuzzi wrote that those “who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.”

Nuzzi also documented one account of a guest who went to a White House event last year and allegedly realized Biden would be unable to make it through the entire reception. That made the guest suddenly “open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after all.”

In the reporter’s account of meeting the president in person, she described him as if he were an “uncanny” being from science fiction or a horror novel, “not of this earth.”

“Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth,” she wrote.

“This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call ‘low trust’ — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable,” Nuzzi described. “His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals.”

She also noted that questions about who was actually running the country were being asked “at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America.”

“[T]hey shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement,” she added.