Joe Biden’s Biggest Supporter: Donald Trump
Trump should be fighting to keep Joe Biden's candidacy alive.
For some, the biggest surprise of last week’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was the sight of an American president stumble around and lose his train of thought as if he was a teenager trying cannabis-laced edibles for the first time. Voters looked on, stunned, as Biden cooked up a bouillabaisse of words that often didn’t relate to one another, frequently drifting off as if he was privately contemplating why Caitlin Clark didn’t make the U.S. Olympic basketball team.
But the true shocker of the evening wasn’t what was said, it was what was left out. Trump, America’s former gasbag-in-chief, actually showed a level of self-restraint that would even impress famous musician and tantric lover Sting.
In the past, we have seen Trump scold, berate, and interrupt Biden on debate stages. But it seems Trump understood what was happening in Biden’s brain, laid back and let it happen.
Sure, at the end of one rambling Biden answer, Trump chimed in by saying “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” But otherwise, Trump, who has not shown any discipline in literally any other aspect of his life, suddenly seemed magnanimous and sympathetic.
An important rule: If Donald Trump feels bad about your diminished mental acuity, then your cognitive situation is more dire than you suspect.
Saying less is a new strategy for Trump, as in the past, he has mocked Biden’s mental competence. Before the 2020 election, he said Biden had already lost his mind.
“I’m telling you he’s shot. There’s something going on,” he said in September 2020. "This guy doesn't have a clue. He doesn't know where the hell he is," Trump said in Pittsburgh later that month. "This guy doesn't know he's alive." (Who would have bet it would be Trump that first channeled Descartes in a 21st century campaign speech?”)
But the politics of Trump’s newly-found discipline are obvious. After years of screaming that Biden is mentally unfit for office, Trump might have finally become the dog that caught the car. With America now seeing that Biden’s brain is oatmeal, there is a real chance Biden could leave the race, leaving Trump with a far less beatable opponent.
This posits Trump with quite a high-wire act; he has to convince people Biden is so mentally compromised that he shouldn’t be president in 2025, but not so old and confused that he should drop out of the race. If Trump runs against Biden, he almost certainly wins; if he has to run against a lucid fresh face, it shakes the race up to the Democrats’ benefit.
Of course, we continue to see Democrats scoff at the idea that Biden would drop out, which is particularly fun given that it is the exact carbon copy of what we have seen with Trump over the years. The situation has completely flipped - now it is Democrats who are unwilling to say the obvious things out loud.
Saddled with a candidate that is clearly unfit for office, partisans rally around their guy, offering preposterous justifications for their unsettling acts. (Trump trying to steal an election was, for example, just concern about “voter fraud,” while Biden’s linebacker-like CTE symptoms are the result of him being on an international flight 12 days prior.)
The depths to which Democrats are willing to plunge to save Biden are an embarrassment to themselves and to any sentient news consumer. In the past week, the campaign has trotted out their own Baghdad Bob, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, to reassure everyone that behind the scenes Biden is secretly working on solving the mystery of cold fusion as he simultaneously trains for the next season of American Ninja Warrior.
Perhaps the Democrats’ most risible talking point is that the debate was “just one bad night,” after the public has seen Biden’s cranial erosion happen quickly over the past three years. Partisans often adopt the mannerisms of their party standard-bearers in order to give them cover - for instance, Yale and Harvard-educated senators now use the ignorant phrase “Democrat Party” (as opposed to “Democratic” because Trump prefers it. Maybe now Democrats can run cover for Biden by trailing off mid-sentence during their television interviews. See, proof it happens to everyone!
(This tactic, of course, was popularized by Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison, who tries to save the feelings of a grade school child with a bladder problem by urinating in his own pants. “Of course I peed my pants! Everybody my age pees their pants; it's the coolest! ... You ain’t cool unless you pee in your pants!”)
But if Biden were to drop out, Trump wouldn’t necessarily need to sweat just yet. The Democratic intelligentsia seems to believe Kamala Harris would naturally become their party’s standard-bearer, despite the fact she actually has a lower approval rating than Biden himself. In her own run for president in 2019, she couldn’t even convince Democrats she was a plausible candidate; she dropped out before the Iowa caucuses with her support at about 3.5 percent of Democratic voters. (During the entire campaign, her support topped out at about 5 percent in the RealClear average of polls.)
It would truly be galaxy-brain stuff for Democrats to replace Biden with someone even less liked than he is. Perhaps to boost her profile, she could change her name to something more popular, like “Ghislaine.”
Obviously, the people who are “close to the president” aren’t going to talk Biden into bowing out, because Biden is the only chance they have at being a person who is “close to the president.” The people in the inner circle will probably ride this flaming plane into the ground - when Biden hands the presidency to Donald Trump, they will all walk away and get jobs elsewhere. In the meantime, while Biden could have once been praised as the man who kept Trump from a second term, he will now be recorded in the history books as the man who made a second Trump term possible.
It also isn’t helpful that Biden’s lackeys are trying to circle the wagons by claiming that nobody but Biden can beat Trump. Evidently Coons (who said this exact thing on ABC’s Sunday morning show this week) is unaware the internet exists, and those clips will be shown ad nauseam by Republicans should someone else end up at the top of the Democratic ticket.
But the hardest part in all of this is Republicans trying to contain their glee at seeing a president turn into a cadaver before Americans’ eyes. They have to somehow convince voters Biden is a walking vegetable, but not so bad that he must be replaced on the ticket. It is why people like the CEO of the Trump SuperPAC have shown up in the Wall Street Journal urging Democrats to keep Biden as their candidate.
Supporting Joe Biden at this point is indistinguishable from supporting Donald Trump. Who knows, Trump may soon shoot off his fat mouth and lay into Biden’s cognitive decline, but he would be far better off letting the public see it for themselves. Joe Biden may not “know he’s alive,” but if Trump was smart, he would work hard to keep the Biden campaign from a meeting with the Grim Reaper.
ALSO
This has been a banner week for people who like to say “I told you so,” so I would like to take this moment to say "I told you so.” Over the past year, I have written column after column predicting exactly this moment would be upon us. Some remembrances from the wayback machine:
In this National Review piece from September of last year, I noted Biden’s bid for re-election was a selfish act, because it very well could end up with Trump being re-elected:
As I said:
“This time, Trump has the good luck of running against a cadaver escaped from a D.C.-area medical school. According to the Wall Street Journal poll, 73 percent of voters said they believe that Biden, who would be 82 years old at the time of his second inauguration, is too old to seek a second term. And that even included two-thirds of Democrats.
Most hilariously, a larger share of voters, by a margin of 10 percent, believe that Trump — the man who fires off daily social-media posts in the style of a methamphetamine-addled wolverine falling down a flight of stairs — is more ‘mentally up to the presidency’ than Biden. Voters honestly believe that if left alone, Biden would go missing, only to be found in downtown Wilmington trying to call Winston Churchill using a discarded corncob.”
In February, I noted that America was effectively running two presidential elections at once - one for the men at the top of the ticket and one for whomever would serve as vice president. Because there remains the possibility that if Trump wins, he will end up in prison, and in Biden wins, he won’t make it very far into his second term - both scenarios which are still alive. (Especially given the announcement that even if Trump wins, the Justice Department will continue his insurrection trial through to Inauguration Day.)
Anyone gaming out the election knows that neither Biden nor Trump has the political capital to remain in office long past Inauguration Day 2025. For both parties, this year’s election is like one of those car-dealer ads that promises you a good trade-in price for any vehicle you can push, pull, or drag to the dealership. Both Republicans and Democrats need to lug their candidates’ political cadavers over the November finish line, then figure it out from there.
Democrats, while not entirely nonplussed at their dire situation, nonetheless have to be far from plussed. More Americans have gone to a theater to see Madame Web than believe Joe Biden is of plausible presidenting age. A recent poll found that 86 percent of Americans thought that, at 81 years old, Biden was too old to serve a second term — and that included 77 percent of Democrats. But if he wins, after a couple of 2025 press conferences where Biden forgets to put on pants and can’t name the current president, Google will be inundated with cabinet secretaries searching “how do u 25th amendment a president.”
One of the things you’re hearing a lot these days is that if Democrats really believed Trump was a threat to democracy, they wouldn’t be running a beatable ticket like Biden and Harris. Which led me to write this in March:
Democrats are publicly in denial about Biden’s age, lashing out against the New York Times for, among other things, publishing poll results showing that nearly eight in ten Americans believe the president is too old to continue. That includes 73 percent of people over 65, meaning people roughly Biden’s own age are looking at him and saying, “The old man’s lost it.” (Only 43 percent felt the same about Trump.)
…
In a perfect scenario, Democrats would handle their presidential position by adopting the Pittsburgh Steelers’ strategy for handling quarterbacks: Bring in an old veteran who has won in the past (in this analogy, Russell Wilson), but have a young, promising backup in the wings (Justin Fields) who can take over if the old guy falters.
The trouble is Kamala Harris is not Justin Fields. She’s a quarterback who throws with the wrong hand and wears her helmet on her foot. Her ineptitude scares the sorts of voters who like Nikki Haley and despise Trump but who also realize that if Harris gets in the game, another catastrophic season is upon us.
All of this has to shock the NeverTrump outlets who have dedicated the last three years to convincing us that Joe Biden both was somehow the greatest president in history, but must drop out of the race IMMEDIATELY. Sure, one can argue Biden is a good president (he isn’t, and may not even currently be acting as president) and yet still think he should drop out - but that desire to see him re-elected clearly blinded a lot of people on my side to the tragedy that would await him as the election drew nearer.
Some of us didn’t miss it.
ALSO:
We are on to Season 26 of the Wasn’t That Special podcast as we chronicle the 50 years of Saturday Night Live. By my count, my cohost and I have watched 505 episodes of SNL in the past calendar year. And it is all for YOU! So join up!
FINALLY:
It’s the bop of the summer - have a fun 4th of July!