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As an outside observer of the US presidential election, I have been wondering for months when Joe Biden’s age will become a thing. Biden is already 81 years old – the oldest person to ever occupy the White House – and is seeking another four-year term. He is older than George W. Bush, who ceased to be president in 2008, and Bill Clinton, who left office in 2000. He is older than the hovercraft, the bar code and the breathalyzer . And he looks it: Biden’s likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, a mere newbie at 77, is possessed of a bronzed, demonic energy that makes him seem vigorously alive, even when his words have no sense. Joe Biden looks like he’s turning into a statue of Joe Biden.
Already this week I saw clips of him confusing current French President Emmanuel Macron with former (and now deceased) President François Mitterrand, and learn about his claims that discussed the European response to the January 6 insurrection with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The latter would have required a Ouija board, as Kohl died in 2017. Biden also repeatedly stumbled over a question about Hamas (whose name he seemed to have forgotten) during a meeting at the White House. Press statement.
The release of the Justice Department’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents has only heightened my concerns. Biden kept classified documents after leaving the Obama administration, special prosecutor Robert Hur found, but Hur saw no realistic prospect of convicting Biden of a crime requiring proof of intent. The president would present himself to the jury, as to the investigators, “as an elderly, friendly and well-meaning man, with a bad memory”.
Convenient vagueness on details, combined with an appeal to public sympathy, has served Biden well at least once before. His first presidential breakthrough in the late 1980s ended in the middle allegations that he plagiarized a speech from a British politician, as well as other uncredited borrowings and changing stories. He said at the time that they were honest mistakes. What happens next, he said, “will depend entirely on how the American people view me.” They’re going to look at me and say, “Is Joe Biden honest with me, or is Joe Biden not honest with me?” » » He eventually dropped out, but his career subsequently flourished.
Today, however, such an argument would be difficult to defend: our boss is not weak; he’s just pretending to be weak to escape criminal charges! But that might be less damaging in a presidential race than Hur’s observation that Biden “didn’t remember his time as vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview the end of his term (“if it was 2013, when did I stop being vice-president”)? Vice-president?’), and forget the second day of the interview at the start of his mandate (“in 2009, am I still vice-president?”).” The prosecutor also claims that Biden “did not remember, even after several years, the death of his son Beau.”
The Biden team’s response has been to reject what it calls “highly damaging language” and “inappropriate” comments in the report, and To note that Biden’s interviews took place in the days following the October 7 attacks on Israel. Hur is a former Trump administration official, chosen by Attorney General Merrick Garland in a move meant to ensure the report’s independence. On X, former member of the Obama administration, Tommy Vietor wrote that the report was “right-wing work from Biden’s own DOJ.”
Even though Biden’s allies will dismiss the report’s accusations as politically motivated, they could nonetheless be extremely damaging. In a survey last year, 77 percent of Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said Biden was too old to be president. (For Trump, the overall figure was 51 percent.) But so far, the conversation about Biden’s age among left-wing commentators has gone something like this: So Joe Biden is pretty old. Should we be worried? The observation came to nothing, because nothing else comes of it. No one seriously challenged him for the nomination. His family members did not help him save face by insisting that he spend more time with them. His party lacks an obvious mechanism to quietly remove him from the scene. Because of these unalterable facts, the discussion about whether he is too old to be president has stalled. Many people think so. But they can’t do anything about it. End of the conversation.
From the outside, it looks like a conspiracy of silence. I’ve been bracing myself for a year to read articles in right-wing media asking, “Why is the left ignoring Biden’s age?” “, even as Trump’s supporters happily ignored his criminal charges, his allegations of sexual offenses, his incompetence, his nascent authoritarianism, and always… more baroque riffs in campaign speeches. (In October, he thoughtful (to find out if he would rather die by electrocution or be eaten by a shark, concluding that he preferred electrocution.) And perhaps some media are wary of appearing to focus on a line of attack that has been so heavily pushed by Biden’s opponents: one of the most vocal conspiracy theories of the 2016 election cycle was that Hillary Clinton was secretly dying of a brain tumor. This rumor gained momentum from the moment she attended a September 11 commemorative event, tripped and had to be placed in the back of a van. (She suffered from pneumonia.) I remember watching the footage and wondering about Clinton’s health myself, only to discover that eight years later she is healthy and hearty. I had been misled by misinformation. Perhaps many on the left are wondering if the rumors about Biden this time are just as ill-founded and malicious.
The crucial difference this time is that we have evidence that Biden is, at best, no longer the politician he was a decade ago. Look at his Speech at the 2016 conference: He looks venerable but energetic. Today he often looks lazy and confused. In recent years we have seen reportsdenied by his press team, that Biden is following a restricted schedule intended to prevent him from burning out, and that his team has reportedly decided to insist that he wear sneakers during the election campaign to avoid falls. He rarely participates in interviews. From the month of August, he had given the fewest presidential press conferences since Ronald Reagan. Throughout the 2020 election, COVID precautions kept him away from spontaneous public places; he did most of his campaigning by video. In this electoral campaign, possible shortcomings will be even more visible.
My colleague McKay Coppins recently suggested that anyone interested in politics should go to a Trump rally, to see what they were voting for (or against). “This may seem unpleasant to some; consider this an act of civic hygiene,” he wrote. I would suggest everyone do the same with a Biden speech: watch it in its entirety and honestly ask yourself whether you think the man you’re seeing has four more years of presidential decision-making ahead of him. If not, accept that you are actually voting for Kamala Harris, or for a regency similar to that of the final years of Reagan’s tenure in the White House.
In my opinion, either scenario is even more comforting than Trump returning to power. I say this particularly as a European, aware that Trump will not continue to support Ukraine and that, therefore, my country and others would have to face an emboldened Vladimir Putin. But I would also say, to myself, that America is a country of over 300 million people, many of whom are brilliant, many of whom can finish a sentence. So how can the presidential election come down to two old men, one recounting shark attacks and the other communing with the dead? It is not too late for either side to offer the United States a better choice in November.
