Biden vs. Trump mentally: It’s spoiled milk vs. arsenic
Please tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally when Donald Trump bottomed out morally long ago.
I’m serious. I’d rather drink milk past its expiration date than arsenic.
In case you’ve missed it, Trump and his minions are getting more and more aggressive — shameless is the better adjective — in their portrayal of Biden as a demented wreck.
This peaked last week with an interview that President Trump gave to Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner. He not only told Zito that Biden “has absolutely no idea what’s happening.” Trump also said: “He doesn’t know he’s alive.”
This wasn’t some offthe-cuff dig. This is Trump’s re-election strategy — well, much of it — in one nasty quip. “I’m rubber, you’re glue” becomes “I’m egomaniacal, you’re incoherent.” Which is rich, coming from the kook who mused about ingesting household bleach.
It’s an ugly tack, but familiar. As the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen observed, media coverage of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign included references to his apparent confusion, questions about his mental alertness and mentions of the prevalence of dementia and senility among people in their mid-to-late 70s. Reagan was then 73.
Biden is 77, but would be 78 at his inauguration. If he’s elected, Thiessen wrote, “He’ll be older on the day he takes office than Reagan was on the day he left office. So, yes, his mental fitness is a legitimate issue.”
I agree. There have been moments aplenty when Biden’s stumbles have made me wince — particularly a doozy from a few days ago, when he seemingly confused lost jobs with lost lives and upped the Covid-19 death toll to “millions of people.”
But Biden’s bumbling isn’t the defining issue, not even close, and we shouldn’t let Trump use it to do in 2020 what he did in 2016, which was to portray his opponent — then, Hillary Clinton — as so enormously unappealing and recklessly unacceptable that, to many Americans, Trump looked ever so marginally better in comparison, which is to say that he looked endurable.
There’s negative campaigning and then there’s what Trump engineers and allows, which is in another grotesque league altogether.
Last time around, the Trump operation’s scorched-earth approach encompassed Russia, Wikileaks, the parading of Bill Clintons’ accusers, the fanning of ludicrous conspiracy theories, chants of “lock her up!” and the suggestion that somebody might someday need to take a shot at Hillary. This is what I mean about a moral bottom.
To hold on to power, this president will do whatever it takes. And in the middle of all of this dying and impoverishment, it’s going to take a lot.
It’s going to take the transformation of China into the most nefarious global menace ever, of Gretchen Whitmer into a communist dominatrix, of the Obama administration and the F.B.I. into a deepstate cabal and of Biden into a doddering, drooling imbecile who’d be tucked away in some attic if he hadn’t already taken refuge in the basement.
Put another way, Trump has to make himself just slightly less awful than everyone and everything else.
It was a false equivalence in 2016 and it’s an even falser one now that we know what a Trump presidency looks like.
Two flawed candidates don’t add up to a jump ball.