This was understandable in that it was Trump’s first since becoming the only former President ever to be indicted. Much of the coverage concerned the fact of the interview itself. On Tuesday, while the comics were still chuckling over Biden’s Egg Roll stylings, and the more serious news in Washington was about a major Pentagon intelligence leak concerning the war in Ukraine, Trump gave a remarkable interview. And that was before Trump lost the election, refused to concede his defeat, and called forth a violent uprising at the Capitol to block the result. TV.”? In 2020, surveys suggested that Biden had a clear advantage over Trump on the question of which candidate possessed the “ mental sharpness” to be President. And Trump, at age seventy-six, is not only almost as old as Biden but immeasurably more volatile, speech-impaired, and downright incomprehensible. It is, according to poll after poll in recent months, Donald Trump. The alternative here is not some beau ideal of a President, smarter, younger, faster, and more ideologically pure than Joe Biden. And, in this regard, there’s a favorite Bidenism that springs to mind, one that the forty-sixth President quotes frequently when election season rolls around: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. The history of the Republic is one long story about having to pick between two inevitably flawed candidates. These concerns may well constitute the biggest impediment to his reëlection in 2024.īut American politics is never about finding the perfect President. By this point, Biden is stuck with the bad politics of being President when you’re an octogenarian: Americans, across party lines, have real and likely unassuageable concerns about his age, endurance, and competence. Bush so memorably did on a particularly ill-fated trip to Japan, in 1992. He’s mostly avoided consequential mistakes while in office, neither tripping and injuring himself, as the eighty-one-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently did, nor throwing up at a diplomatic dinner, as President George H. To be sure, Biden was a self-described gaffe machine as a younger politician, too. The gaffe-labelled “ cringeworthy” or merely “ unfortunate,” depending on who was doing the labelling-got even more attention after the White House edited the mistake out of the official transcript. (And, it must be said, who flubs an interview at an egg roll?) On Wednesday, while at a pub in the Irish town of Dundalk, Biden managed to mistake the All Blacks, New Zealand’s rugby team, for the notorious Black and Tans British paramilitary unit that fought against the Irish Republican Army a century ago. Whenever Biden speaks in public, and especially when he travels, as he did this week to Northern Ireland, his slipups, fumbled words, or garbled sentences make headlines, whether age-related or not.Ī flubbed interview on Monday at the White House Easter Egg Roll-in which Biden told the NBC “Today” show’s Al Roker that, after the 2024 election, he’ll “either be rolling an egg or end up being the guy who’s pushing ’em out”-led to an entire riff by the late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, no Biden-hater, joking about whether the President was “mentally fit” to run again. This winter, after Biden stumbled twice in two weeks on the stairs of Air Force One, a slew of news stories followed. Anyone hypervigilant for signs that Biden is getting too old can find ample evidence in every quaver of his voice, every slowed step across a stage. But Republicans have kept up a near-daily barrage of attacks on “Sleepy Joe,” and their narrative, true or not, has been aided by the President’s visible aging. No doubt, those factors have contributed, too. That is the proportion of Americans who say that Biden, already America’s oldest President at the age of eighty and about to launch a bid for a second term, does not have “the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president.” This metric, which has gone up sixteen points since Biden started campaigning four years ago, suggests that it’s not merely reflexive partisanship or the country’s dyspeptic post-pandemic mood that is responsible for Biden’s persistently low approval ratings. A particularly brutal number for Joe Biden was contained in a CNN poll conducted last month: sixty-seven per cent.
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