Biden's Old But Trump's Old, Evil, And Insane. Why Did Voters Choose The Combo Package?
Neapolitan ice cream voting
This piece was written before former President Biden’s cancer diagnosis.
The media coverage Joe Biden has received recently might seem a tad excessive considering he’s no longer president or starring in Oh, Mary! When George W. Bush left office in 2009, he was allowed to retire from public life and master pretzel eating in peace. Of course, his successor wasn’t a raving lunatic who threatened the entire free world, no matter what Glenn Beck told your parents.
Democrats are especially annoyed about two new books about Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, both of which cover the final days of the Biden administration. Original Sin in particular argues there was a deliberate cover up of Biden’s decline that ended with his disastrous debate performance. If so, it was never the most effective cover-up, like when I spilled soda on my mother’s rug in 1985 and covered up the sticky stain with a towel.
Everyone was aware that Joe Biden was old and most voters consistently stated that they didn’t want him to run for a second term. As early as summer 2022, a New York Times poll revealed that 61 percent of Democratic voters didn’t want Biden as the nominee. An NPR headline from 2023 stated, “Many voters think Biden is too old for a second term. The White House isn't worried.” (It should have been.) In August 2023, the Associated Press wrote, “Biden is widely seen as too old for office, an AP-NORC poll finds. Trump has problems of his own.” (Trump was out on bail on four separate criminal indictments.)
The more these similar reports emerged, the more they were dismissed as fake news. They still are, as many Democrats insist that voters would never have noticed that Biden was old if the media never asked people about his age or wrote about it in the first place. Just spread a towel over the whole matter.
Beto O’Rourke — unsuccessful Senate and presidential candidate but successful Pod Save America guest — said Biden should’ve never run again and that Democrats will have a credibility problem with voters unless they own up to this. (Watch below.)
I don’t disagree, though I’ve argued since 2019 that Democrats should never have nominated someone who they weren’t confident could serve two full terms. We weren’t so desperate in 2020 that we had to sacrifice incumbency. A plethora of non-assuming, mainstream liberal Democrats were running. Cory Booker was right there! Many Biden defenders will stamp their feet and insist that “Black voters chose Biden and their word is final!” That’s flattering, but Black people aren’t infallible. We make mistakes. Just look at how we were dressed in the 1970s.
Democrats are perhaps rightly salty that voters seemingly disqualified Biden for his age, when Donald Trump is also old but evil and insane, as a bonus. So, if you had the big science lab chalkboard with negatives for both candidates, under Biden’s name, you’d write, “old” but under Trump, you’d write “old, evil, and insane.” The math seems clear.
Perhaps that’s why partisan Democrats felt so confident riding with Biden against Trump. Although, it was always a big gamble. When Biden launched his re-election campaign in April 2023, his approval rating was in the low 40s. However, Trump was under indictment for several major felonies, including his attempted coup and stealing classified documents. He was an adjudicated rapist. If Republicans behaved rationally, they’d nominate a non-felon like Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, both of whom were born in the same decade that Biden was elected to the Senate. This would make Biden’s age even more of a liability. And if Trump did win the nomination despite his rap sheet, this would mean Republican voters were openly members of a cult of personality. The entire election would then hinge on the relatively few independent, swing voters — a notoriously fickle group that was hardly devoted to Biden.
Where are all the ‘Trump is old’ tell-all books?
Liberals have complained that the media ignored Donald Trump’s own obvious decline. Writer Charlotte Clymer asked Jake Tapper on social media, “… is there any timeline for reporting on Donald Trump’s clear pattern of cognitive deterioration? I figured you’d be a great person to ask given that you’ve done so much research and reporting on this area of medicine.” (I think she’s being sarcastic.)
Clymer’s frustration over the Biden coverage isn’t unique. However, despite the press’s tendency to “sanewash” Trump, Kamala Harris won voters who received their news through traditional media. Jake Tapper probably wasn’t the reason that working-class, young Black and Latino voters started steadily moving away from Biden during his term. (Whenever I raised alarms about this issue, partisan Democrats were quick to once again dismiss it as “fake news.”)
Trump had his share of negative news cycles, as well. Barely a month before that fateful presidential debate, Trump was literally convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York criminal case. Former White House officials and even some almost respectable Republicans called him unhinged and unfit to lead. His hate rally speeches were often described as “disjointed,” “rambling,” and “incoherent.” A PBS News headline from October 24 read, “Trump’s rambling speeches raise questions about mental decline.”
The New York Times ran a piece in October titled, “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.” An editorial that month in the Las Vegas Sun stated, “Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becoming a troubling concern.” (Trump would later flip Nevada red for the first time since 2004.)
As I once wrote for
, Trump is everything awful everywhere all at once, which makes it harder to pin a specific, defining narrative on him. Politically, he’s like that Simpsons episode when Mr. Burns is declared “the sickest man in the United States.” The only reason he hadn’t died already is because all the diseases in his body somehow counteracted each other. (Watch below.)Of course, Biden and Democrats avoided hammering Trump on his age because it was an obvious area of weakness for Biden, who was four years older. Nikki Haley, however, did make age an issue during her presidential campaign.
“Why do we have to have someone in their 80s running for office?” Haley asked at a campaign stop. “Why can’t they let go of the power and let new a generational leader come in there?”
Calling Biden and Trump “grumpy old men,” Haley said they should take basic competency tests to prove to voters they were fit to serve.
Yet the way that Trump’s Republican opponents spoke about his advanced age, compared to Biden’s, reflects an unfortunate reality about how voters in general viewed the two men. For instance, Ron DeSantis and Haley surrogate Chris Sununu both talked about Trump having “lost his fastball,” which of course presumes he ever had one. Haley, though, did more than just suggest that Biden was slipping. She claimed he wouldn’t even survive a second term. “A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris” was a frequent and macabre line in her stump speech.
Eventually, Biden did try going on the offensive against Trump on age. He told Seth Meyers during a February 2024 interview, “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.” He described Trump as someone who could’ve gone to the high school with him. This was a coordinated talking point that other Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would echo.
Biden stressed that voters should focus more on the age of the candidates’ ideas, which would’ve worked better if he hadn’t wandered off during his next comment: “Look, I mean, this is a guy who wants to take us back,” he said, presumably about Trump. “He wants to take us back on Roe v. Wade, he wants to take us back on a whole range of issues that are — 50, 60 years, they’ve been solid American positions.”
I confess I’ll never understand why Biden could never just say “abortion” or “women’s rights,” especially when Trump kept framing his attacks on trans people as a “women’s rights” issue.
Even Trump’s insane rants benefitted from specificity: “They’re eating the dogs …. "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating — they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” It’s a bigoted ear worm.
Too many voters saw Trump as “crazy grandpa” but Biden as simply frail and out of it. It was a devastating contrast. The sad irony is that the gaffe-prone, memeable Biden from the Obama years was very much “crazy grandpa in cool shades.” The “Dark Brandon” memes were an attempt to resuscitate that image, but it didn’t fetch beyond those already supportive of the former president. Whether Biden deserved this or not is immaterial in politics. As Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
" like when I spilled soda on my mother’s rug in 1985 and covered up the sticky stain with a towel."
That was YOU????!!!
"Crazy Grandpa" is a pretty malevolent choice for voters to make, I gotta say...especially since Crazy Grandpa is also one of the stupidest people that's ever existed. Of course he's also mean which fits the mean and stupid of his supporters. And those supporters at least were emboldened because of his plans for ethnic cleansing and that he hates the same minorities they do.
Sadopopulism is the third rail of politics because it always, ALWAYS ends badly. But we can't deny that it's also super powerful. Looking at the fate of the Haitians in Springfield, OH told me all I need to know about this shitty country.
And of course there's not going to be any stories about President Klan Robe being old, nor any tell-all books. Because the point of Biden Old is to have some sort of FUD that Democrats can fall for, to throw Biden under the bus...as it was important to destroy that generational progressive legislation he helped shepherd through. And the easiest way to get clout being shitting on Dems, and there you go. You can also magnify any crisis into the Worst Ever and even build clout on that too. Certainly it does not hurt to have a rightwing media human centipede to spread the smears too.
At least Democrats know the rules going forward: "Don't be old," and probably also "Don't be female, especially a Black one," and I think we'll be fine until some other thing is brought up to be FUD to dismiss whomever gets out of the primary.