I’ll Take Biden’s Confusion Over Trump’s Corruption
Let’s
not repeat the false equivalence of 2016.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 17, 2020, 8:00 a.m. ET
Please
tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally when Donald
Trump bottomed out morally long ago.
I’m serious. I’d rather drink milk past
its expiration date than arsenic.
In
case you’ve missed it, Trump and his minions are getting more and more aggressive
— shameless is the better adjective — in their portrayal of Biden as a demented
wreck.
This
peaked last week with an interview that
President Trump gave to Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner. He not only
told Zito that Biden “has absolutely no idea what’s happening.” Trump also
said: “He doesn’t know he’s alive.”
This
wasn’t some off-the-cuff dig. This is Trump’s re-election strategy — well, much
of it — in one nasty quip. “I’m rubber, you’re glue” becomes “I’m
egomaniacal, you’re incoherent.” Which is rich, coming from the kook
who mused about ingesting household bleach.
Team
Trump has been at this for months. I happened to be watching a lot of Fox News
in early March — it’s necessary research, though it feels more like flogging
oneself — and barely an hour went by without a host or guest asserting that the
Democratic Party had rallied around Biden precisely because they detected a
cognitive void where a vice president once existed.
In
other words: Because Biden is out to lunch, unprincipled Democratic power
brokers can put whatever they want on his plate. He’ll docilely sup on it and
then ask for more.
The
Fox News regular Brit Hume said flat-out that Biden was “getting senile.”
Rudy Giuliani, throwing stones from his glass house, sputtered that Biden was
exhibiting “obvious signs of dementia.”
And
that message is now a fixture of the Trump campaign’s social-media efforts. As
Nick Corasaniti and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times on Friday, “The campaign’s ads
on Facebook have taken their own dark turn. Its videos on the platform declare
‘Geriatric Health is No Laughing
Matter’ or ‘Joe Biden: Old and Out of It,’
then use selective edits of Mr. Biden’s verbal stumbles and meandering
soliloquies to make less-than-subtle suggestions about his mental acuity.”
It’s
an ugly tack, but familiar. As the Washington Post columnist Marc
Thiessen observed, media
coverage of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign included
references to his apparent confusion, questions about his mental alertness and
mentions of the prevalence of dementia and senility among people in their
mid-to-late 70s. Reagan was then 73.
Biden
is 77, but would be 78 at his inauguration. If he’s elected, Thiessen wrote,
“He’ll be older on the day he takes office than Reagan was on the day
he left office. So, yes, his
mental fitness is a legitimate issue.”
I
agree. There have been moments aplenty when Biden’s stumbles have made me wince
— particularly a doozy from a few days ago, when he seemingly confused lost jobs with
lost lives and upped the Covid-19 death toll to “millions of
people.”
But
Biden’s bumbling isn’t the defining issue, not even close, and we shouldn’t let
Trump use it to do in 2020 what he did in 2016, which was to portray his
opponent — then, Hillary Clinton — as so enormously unappealing and recklessly
unacceptable that, to many Americans, Trump looked ever so marginally better in
comparison, which is to say that he looked endurable.
There’s
negative campaigning and then there’s what Trump engineers and allows, which is
in another grotesque league altogether. On Saturday, the president’s eldest
son, Donald Trump Jr., took to Instagram to insinuate — without a whiff of
substantiation — that Biden was a pedophile.
Last
time around, the Trump operation’s scorched-earth approach encompassed Russia, Wikileaks,
the parading of Bill Clintons’ accusers, the fanning of ludicrous conspiracy
theories, chants of “lock her up!” and the suggestion that somebody might
someday need to take a shot at Hillary. This is what I mean
about a moral bottom.
In
anticipation of November, he has already tried to extort political help from
the president of Ukraine. Remember impeachment? I sometimes get the sense that
it has faded from consciousness. (A pandemic can have that effect.) Don’t
forget Trump’s “perfect” phone call, because it’s not history. It’s harbinger.
There are surely dirtier tricks to come.
To
hold on to power, this president will do whatever it takes. And in the middle
of all of this dying and impoverishment, it’s going to take a lot.
It’s
going to take the transformation of China into the most nefarious global menace
ever, of Gretchen Whitmer into a communist dominatrix, of the Obama
administration and the F.B.I. into a deep-state cabal and of Biden into a
doddering, drooling imbecile who’d be tucked away in some attic if he hadn’t
already taken refuge in the basement.
Put
another way, Trump has to make himself just slightly less awful than everyone
and everything else. He has to get a crucial number of voters who are either
genuinely wavering, considering a third-party candidate or looking for an
excuse to vote for him to say what many of them did four years ago: “The
Democrats haven’t given me any real choice. There are no good options.”
It
was a false equivalence then and it’s an even falser one now that we know what
a Trump presidency looks like, now that we’ve been subjected to the endless
lying and the baseless bragging and the self-pity and the self-dealing and the
grandiosity and the corruption and the incompetence and Jared and Ivanka and
the whole wretched crew of delusional opportunists.
Two flawed candidates don’t add up to a
jump ball.
Let’s
say, for the sake of argument, that Biden has lost a few steps. Let’s posit
that while he was always a font of gaffes, he’s now a geyser of them. Let’s
assume that his herky-jerky conversational gait betrays a herky-jerky
intellectual one.
It
nonetheless remains true that he got through a two-person, two-hour debate with
Bernie Sanders in mid-March without embarrassing himself in the slightest. Besides,
the precise agility of his mind has nothing to do with the fundamental decency
of his values. At the end of the day, Biden can be trusted to do what Trump
didn’t and won’t: stock his administration with qualified professionals. He
could compensate for any supposed cognitive deficit with a surplus of talent.
Trump
can’t fill his moral vacuum. By its nature, it prevents him from recognizing or
caring about it. Confused is fixable. Rotten isn’t.
So
let Trump tweet and bleat to his heart’s content about Biden as some blithering
idiot.
It’s
not just over the top; it’s irrelevant.
At least Biden’s not poison.
Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995
and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief
and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the
author of three best-selling books. @FrankBruni • Facebook
