Donald Trump has long attacked Joe Biden, his likely opponent at the polls next year, as “Sleepy Joe”, portraying the 80-year-old president as too old and too mentally fogged to occupy the Oval Office. As recently as Friday, the former president attacked his successor for being unfit to deal with Russia and the threat of nuclear war.
But Trump’s tactics rebounded when he said Biden threatened to lead the US into “world war two” – and suggested that he, Trump, thought he had beaten Barack Obama for the presidency back in 2016.
There have been two world wars. The first ended in 1918, the second in 1945. The cold war, the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union that often threatened a third world war, ended with the fall of the communist regime in Moscow in 1991.
Obama was president, and Biden vice-president, from 2009 to 2017. In the 2016 election, Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
Mockery of Trump’s stumbles was immediate and sustained. But it also pointed to an increasingly stark issue on both sides of the aisle: the advanced age of many American leaders, and polling that shows most voters want generational change.
At 80, Biden is the oldest president ever. Should he win re-election and serve a full term, he will be 86 on leaving office. Polling has shown more than 75% of Americans think he is too old for a second term.
Trump is 77 but polls show significantly fewer voters think he is too old to return to power. Whether gaffes like those he made in Washington move the needle remains, of course, to be seen.
Addressing the Pray, Vote, Stand summit, a rightwing event, Trump said Biden was “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead and … now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war”.
Under Biden, he added: “We would be in world war two.”
On Monday, the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, laughed as he said: “It’s almost like it’s the summer of 1939 all over again. You know, [Trump’s] father’s going to a Nazi rally or something, or a Klan rally. I don’t know which rally he did or didn’t go to.”
Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens, New York, in 1927. Donald Trump has reportedly expressed sympathy for Nazism and Adolf Hitler.
“But yeah,” Scarborough said. “You think they may want to take out the ‘cognitively impaired’ part of his speeches from now on.”
Jonathan Lemire, his fellow host, said: “That’s an attack line the Republicans and Trump love to use [against Biden] but, man, that does seem like he was looking in the mirror just there.
“I mean … we see these polls that suggest that voters are more concerned about President Biden’s age than Donald Trump’s age. Trump is only three years younger and anyone watching Trump day in, day out says he’s changed too.”
Biden says he is fit to serve. So does Trump, telling NBC in an interview broadcast on Sunday “there should be a competency” test for presidents, of the sort he “aced” while in the White House. That prompted memories of previous national mirth, when in summer 2020 Trump, then 74, bragged about successfully recognising “person, woman, man, camera, TV” in a cognitive exam.
But, again, the issue remains a serious one.
Democrats protest that disproportionate attention is paid to Biden’s age than that of Trump. Last week, Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, told CBS News: “Joe Biden is getting older, we all know that. But the other guy he’s probably going to be running against is getting older, too. And in the focus groups that I’m doing, old and steady still beats old and crazy.”
Nonetheless, on Sunday, a new poll from CBS and YouGov said only 34% of voters thought Biden would complete a second term if elected. Asked the same question about Trump, 55% said they thought he would complete a full four years.
Asked if the two men had the necessary mental and cognitive health to be president, 26% said only Biden did, 44% said only Trump did and 23% said neither did.
Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil lawsuits notwithstanding, Trump leads Republican polling by wide margins. His challengers have made age and cognitive ability an issue but such is Trump’s dominance, they have mostly directed their fire at Biden.
Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor who is a distant second to Trump, said last week age was “absolutely a legitimate concern” when electing a president.
“The presidency’s not a job for someone that’s 80 years old,” DeSantis told CBS.
He did not say if he thought the same about someone who was 77, and who the former Republican party chair Michael Steele called a “dumbass”, over his Washington remarks.
But DeSantis added: “Obviously, I’m the governor of Florida, I know a lot of people who are elderly, they’re great people, but you’re talking about a job where you need to give it 100%, we need an energetic president.”
Concern about the age of many US party leaders has spread beyond the presidency, particularly given public health scares suffered by Mitch McConnell, the 81-year-old Republican leader in the Senate, and Dianne Feinstein, the 90-year-old Democratic senator from California.
DeSantis said: “I think that if the founders could kind of look at this again, I do think they probably would’ve put an age limit on some of these offices.”
I kind of hate to say it, but even though Trump is much more deserving of a guillotine and a shallow grave, he’s far more lucid than Biden. The “world war two” thing is hardly a gaffe, I’m 25 and I say shit like that sometimes, and then the rest of the article is kind of a nothingburger when it comes to Trump’s mental intactness. It’s important that we base our critiques of ghouls on material reality - Trump is bad because his actions and beliefs are evil. We don’t need to invent things that aren’t true in order to criticize him.
Trump shouldn’t be banned from the presidency because he’s cognitively failing, Trump should be banned from the presidency because he should instead have an appointment with a lethal injection. Don’t lump him in with innocent people who have dementia just because you don’t like him and want to tack on even more negative qualities.
I’m trans. I wish Trump was cognitively declining. A senile Trump would be far less harmful of a president than the Trump I see. But if we keep infantalizing him and misrepresenting him to ourselves like this, we will have an inaccurate characterization of our enemy, it will lead to poor tactics in 2024, and we will lose.
And yet they say Biden has dementia because he has a stutter. The same stutter he’s had his entire life. Why is a stutter a sign of mental decline?
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I bet $20 you’ve never seen a Biden speech that wasn’t edited specifically to make him sound senile.
you can excuse the WW2 ‘gaffe’, what about how he claimed to beat Obama in 2016? or the other 7653 ‘gaffes’ he’s made in the last year alone
He’s stressed and getting older and it’s showing. I agree with your sentiment, he shouldn’t be underestimated.
I do think this is good political theater on the part of the liberal media in that it embarrasses him. While he has no shame he is a raging narcissist which means the more he showboats the more bruised his ego.
The more bruised the ego, the more stressed, the more mistakes. More mistakes means more evidence for the prosecutor.
His lawyers have repeatedly advised him to sit down and shut up. So, while he is an expert manipulator (this is a tactic he developed to get his needs meet, because his dad’s love was conditional), he’s also addicted to attention. He’s making the mistake all addicts make, to put access above personal safety. Especially under stress.
In other words, in this case, he’s being a dumbass. And while he’s still dangerous. He’s not rational.
Oh, he’s definitely dangerous, he’s definitely being a dumbass, and he’s definitely not rational, but he can string together a sentence and often times even a paragraph. That’s more than can be said for a lot of politicians, Biden included. I personally believe that if we pull another 2015, we will see another 2016.
I begrudgingly watched most of Trump’s and Biden’s speeches. The fact you think Trump is more coherent than more than like 5% of Congress is absolutely wild. And Biden has a well documented stutter and is still light years ahead of Trump. You should actually watch the 2 speak instead of getting 10 second sound bites from whatever right wing source is telling you this.
Biden’s not in decline. He’s been stable since before the presidency. For all any of us know, he’s on pregabalin for nerve pain (a medication I take that causes me every symptom I see Joe have, and I’m not even 50).
My point is, Joe’s gaffes can be many other things other than mental decline, and since he hasn’t declined in 4 years, it’s not that.
Cognitive decline is rapid, as you made an allusion to, we’ve watched it happen to two other representatives in the last year.
It’s more likely that Trump is in decline over the recent gaffes, because they’re new. Biden has been stable for years. Stability isn’t decline and the man is allowed some medical privacy.
Honestly you sound still bitter about Hillary. Which I get. But Biden is going to be the democratic hopeful because he’s the sitting president. Unless he steps down or has a major medical event, you need to accept that and realize that your comments are not fucking helpful if you really want to see someone other than Trump in office come 2024.