If Biden Is The Democratic Nominee... The Presidency Will Hinge Not On Policy But On Comparisons Between His And Trump's Dishonesty, Family Members And Dementia

I'm no clairvoyant but it didn't take much insight to figure out that if the Democrats nominate Biden, Trump will make the race into one that asks each voter to grapple not with pressing issues-- especially since Biden, like hillary before him, doesn't really for anything other than anti-Trump-- but with who has a more repulsive corrupt family, who lies more and whose dementia is further advanced. Democrats who vote for Biden in primaries and caucuses deserve that kind of a campaign... and the pre-ordained results.

Tucker Carlson's propaganda website was on the dementia aspect on Friday. "Republicans are preparing a full court press on former Vice President Joe Biden’s mental fitness for office in the event that he wins the Democratic presidential nomination, GOP sources told the Daily Caller News Foundation." They referred to debate comments by Cory Booker, Tim Ryan and Julian Castro about Biden's lack of mental fitness, while noting that Democrats have by and large, "been hesitant to press the issue beyond making passing comments."

Republicans, meanwhile, are preparing to highlight questions about Biden’s fitness if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

A Trump campaign official told the DCNF that Biden’s “capacity” will be an issue in a potential general election matchup, echoing language used by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly taken shots at Biden, saying the former vice president is “not playing with a full deck” and “has lost his fastball.” Trump’s campaign has already churned out videos highlighting Biden’s struggles.

Is "but Trump is even more senile" the campaign you want to see? The GOP has been keeping track of the examples that seem to prove that the flood of Biden's gaffes is more about deteriorating brain function than anything else. Here's the list the Daily Caller put together:

Biden trailed off Monday while citing the Declaration of Independence, telling a crowd: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the, you know, you know the thing.”

He told a South Carolina crowd on Feb. 25 that he’s “a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate” and that they should “vote for the other Biden” if they don’t like him. He also told a South Carolina crowd he is “looking forward to appointing the first African-American woman to the United States Senate.”

“We have to choose truth over facts,” Biden said in August 2019.

He claimed in the Feb. 25 debate that gun violence killed 150 million people-- roughly half the U.S. population-- in a decade.

Biden also said in a debate last September that he is “the vice president of the United States” and called Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders “the president” of the country.

Biden, whose campaign didn’t return a request for comment, has also struggled with places and dates.

“I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?” he asked a New Hampshire crowd in August 2019. Biden said in December that the Obama administration took place in 1976, before correcting himself. He appeared to confuse the 2016 and 2010 elections in a Feb. 20 town hall. He has also confused both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former British Prime Minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher, who passed away in 2013 and whose reign as British prime minister ended in 1990.

John Harris took the whole senility question up for Politico Magazine readers over the weekend: 2020 becomes the dementia campaign. He points out as a starter that both Trump and Biden are "facing pervasive public speculation that they are becoming senile... Trump himself-- seemingly indifferent to the glass-houses maxim-- in recent days has upped the ante in what is becoming the senility sweepstakes. On Monday he said if Biden is elected, 'They are going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country.' At a town hall on Fox Thursday, Trump cited verbal stumbles by Biden and asserted, 'There’s something going on there.' Friday morning on Twitter he said Biden would destroy Medicare and Social Security 'and not even know he’s doing it.'"

Concerns about the physical and mental frailties of older presidents are far from a new phenomenon. Ronald Reagan faced questions about potential metal decline in 1984, when in a general election debate he recited an anecdote that wandered off to nowhere, a full decade before he announced he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 suffered a massive heart attack that sidelined him for weeks. Eager to show that they were not repeating deceptions of declining health that marked the late presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ike’s physicians gave medical updates that included reports of his bowel movements.

But discussions of presidential health in those earlier times were made with a kind of hushed solemnity that now seems eons away. Modern media often takes the sort of conversations that political operatives and reporters have always had and loudly amplifies them for a mass audience.

In the case of both Biden and Trump, as their public appearances often vary widely in crispness and command of detail, the reporter-operative conversation increasingly sounds something like the way family members discuss an elderly relative, trying to distinguish normal aging from something more troubling.

“I’m becoming worried, Dad really seemed lost at dinner.” “No, no, that’s just because all the ambient noise makes it hard for him to hear. One-on-one he’s as sharp as you or me.” “I don’t know, sis, I don’t think you are facing facts.” “Oh, so now this is about me?!”

Even in his early days in the Senate, where he arrived at age 30 in 1972, Biden was known for a garrulous and sometimes discursive style. In the context of a presidential campaign, however, this can cause raised eyebrows.

At the most recent Democratic debate, which was generally praised as a forceful performance by Biden, his answer on whether he would allow Chinese firms to build U.S. critical infrastructure was, arguably, cumulatively coherent even though many individual sentences were not: “No, I would not. And I spent more time with [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping than any world leader had by the time we left office. This is a guy who is, who doesn't have a democratic, with a small ‘d,’ bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug, who in fact has a million Uighurs in ‘reconstruction camps,’ meaning concentration camps. This is a guy who you see what's happening right now in-- in Hong Kong, and this is a guy who I was able to convince should join the international agreement at the Paris agreement because, guess what, they need to be involved. You can cooperate and you can also dictate exactly what they are, when in fact they said, ‘We're going to set up a no-fly zone, that you can't fly through our zone.’ He said, ‘What do you expect me to do?’ when I was over there. I said, ‘We're going to fly right through it.’ We flew B-1 bombers through it. We've got to make it clear. They must play by the rules. Period, period, period.”

Trump partisans eager to exploit Biden’s circuitous words may wish first to review the large anthology of Trump classics. These include the president’s remarks to the National Republican Campaign Committee last April, when he free-associated about Democrats’ promotion of alternative energy: “Hillary wanted to put up wind. Wind. If you-- if you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations: Your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, OK? ‘Rrrrr, rrrrr’ you know the thing that makes the-- it’s so noisy. And of course it’s like a graveyard for birds. If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery.”

He continued in this vein, then his mind moved vagrantly to North Korea negotiations, before returning to windmills with a lurch, by invoking a hypothetical couple who can’t watch TV because there is no wind: ”No, wind’s not so good. And you know, you have no idea how expensive it is to make those things. They’re all made in China and Germany, but the way, just in case you’re-- we don’t make ’em here, essentially. We don’t make ’em here. And by the way, the carbon, and all those things flying up in the air, you know the carbon footprint? President Obama used to talk about the carbon footprint, and then he’d hop on Air Force One, a big 747 with very old engines, and he’d fly to Hawaii to play a round of golf. You tell me, the carbon footprint.”

The strangeness of these remarks got ample news coverage at the time, but not much from conservative commentators. In recent days, however, many of these people gleefully have trained fire on Biden. Examples from recent days, compiled by my colleague Rishika Dugyala, suggest at least a loosely coordinated campaign on the right.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who often speaks with Trump, said it is “a legitimate question” whether the former vice president has “the stamina and the strength, the mental acumen and the focus required to serve in what is the most difficult job in the world, period … without a doubt, Biden is struggling.” Carlson, who also speaks informally with Trump, said Biden has “clearly lost it,” and “is noticeably more confused now than he was even last spring when he entered the race.” Radio host and author Ann Coulter said that “no Republican with that level of senile dementia that Biden has” could run for president because they would be savaged by the media.

The problem for “the media,” like for voters generally, is that there is no solid consensus about how to assess cognitive health, what types of medical records should be in the public domain especially for aging candidates, and no way to enforce that consensus if it existed. The issue is especially acute now that so much power in American government is held by people over age 65. While rates of dementia are going down gradually in the United States, 65 is the age at which geriatric researcher Kenneth Langa at the University of Michigan found that 20 to 25 percent of people have mild cognitive impairment and 10 percent have dementia. Six members of the Supreme Court are over 65, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will turn 80 on March 26, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last month turned 78.

In Trump’s case, he has often gotten lost rhetorically in precisely the same ways for which he mocks Biden. He once referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “Betanyahu.” In December, more than 700 psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals submitted a petition to Congress during the impeachment inquiry warning that President Donald Trump's mental health was rapidly deteriorating. MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough, who has known Trump for years, said comments the president made speculating that if Andrew Jackson had come later he might have prevented the Civil War reminded Scarborough of his mother’s struggles with dementia. The Morning Joe host also told his audience in 2018, “It's getting worse, and not a single person who works for him doesn’t know he has early signs of dementia.”

Accusations that politicians may be drifting toward non compos mentis typically can’t be divorced from political differences that don’t concern age.

Glenn Greenwald, publisher of The Intercept, who is backing Sanders, said on Twitter: “The steadfast, willful refusal of Dem political & media elites to address what is increasingly visible to the naked eye-- Biden’s serious cognitive decline-- is frightening indeed, not only for what it portends for 2020 but what it says about the ease of snapping them into line...” He was responding to one of his reporters saying that Biden is “sundowning.”

Matt Stoller, another voice on the left and Sanders backer, said on Twitter: "Democratic insiders know Biden has cognitive decline issues. They joke about it. They don’t care."

In fact, a kind of ghoulish gallows humor about the issue is widespread in political circles in both parties, in part because people simply don’t see much of alternative. My colleague Marc Caputo said on Twitter that a Democratic operative with presidential campaign experience described the likely 2020 race like this: “the nice old guy with Alzheimer’s against the mean old man with dementia.”

In her column-- Trump's Crazy Fantasy World-- this morning, Maureen Dowd noted that though "the cruel insults to Joe Biden’s mental acuity are flying fast and ferocious on Fox News," those closest to Trump understand exactly how impaired his brain is from his severe malignant narcissism.

In his new book, Front Row at the Trump Show, Jonathan Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, reports the surprising fact that one of those calls on Trump derangement came from inside the White House.

Karl recounts that when Mick Mulvaney became acting chief of staff, he took senior White House staffers to Camp David for a weekend retreat. He recommended they read a 2011 book, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi, director of the mood disorders program at Tufts Medical Center.

...As Karl writes: “The new acting chief of staff seemed to be saying President Trump was mentally ill-- and that this was a good thing. The corollary to that theory: Don’t try to control the man in the Oval Office. What you think is madness is actually genius.”

In his book, Ghaemi says of people with mental disorder mania: “Decisions seem easy; no guilt, no doubt, just do it. The trouble is not in starting things, but in finishing them; with so much to do and little time, it’s easy to get distracted … affairs are common; divorce is the norm… Mania is like a galloping horse… In Freudian terms, one might say that mania enhances the id, for better or worse.”

When Karl reached out to Ghaemi to ask how Trump would fit into his thesis, Ghaemi replied “perfectly,” noting that the president has “mild manic symptoms all the time.” Ghaemi also concedes in his book that extreme forms of mania can be highly disabling and dangerous.

Trump is continuing his Panglossian handling of the coronavirus. “The tests are beautiful!” he said as he toured the C.D.C. Friday evening, after a kerfuffle over delays in testing. “The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect,” he added, referring to his communication with the president of Ukraine. “This is the highest-level test anywhere.” “I like this stuff, I really get it,” he said, adding that maybe he should have become a scientist, like his uncle the “super genius,” instead of running for president.