New York Times Declares Biden Decrepit Old Man, Trump Strong Youthful Dancing Machine
A Study In Shamelessness
Saturday, the New York Times published the following exercise in bad journalism, Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump. The article is wholly absurd and a transparent attempt to justify the Times’ own lousy coverage of this issue. If voters think President Joe Biden is one of the walking dead, it’s because the Times and other mainstream media outlets keep talking about it. Reporter Rebecca Davis O’Brien’s article was one of a half dozen the Times ran over the weekend in response to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s hit job last week. He threw the ball and the Times played fetch.
Biden was old when he announced his candidacy in 2019, older still when he defeated much younger candidates (excluding Bernie Sanders) in the Democratic primary, and had just turned 78 when he won the presidency. His advanced age never stopped people from voting for him.
O’Brien claims that “voters are much less likely to worry that Mr. Trump is too old to serve.” Her evidence is a much-disputed New York Times/Siena college poll from last fall. She doesn’t offer the important context that Donald Trump has been indicted four times across four different jurisdictions. He’s facing 91 felony charges, and a jury also found him liable for sexual assault. If a restaurant served me a kale salad with a used hypodermic on the side, I wouldn’t bother complaining that the kale was wilted.
Then O’Brien states as objective fact that Biden is a fossilized mummy barely able to stumble through the West Wing without tripping over his bandages.
Some of it comes down to basic physical differences.
Mr. Biden’s voice has grown softer and raspier, his hair thinner and whiter. He is tall and trim but moves more tentatively than he did as a candidate in 2019 and 2020, often holding his upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty. And he has had spills in the public eye: falling off a bicycle, tripping over a sandbag.
This is all ridiculous upon examination. Meryl Streep’s voice is probably softer and raspier than it was when she made Devil Wears Prada. She remains one of the best actors working today. People in early middle age often have thinner and whiter hair. She’s describing normal age-related changes as symptoms of perilous health. She says Biden appears frail but immediately mentions how he fell off a bicycle — a sign that he’s fit enough for regular exercise. People half Biden’s half age fall off bikes and trip over objects.
The Times confuses 2024 Trump with 1964 Beatles
What O’Brien writes next about Trump would embarrass North Korean state media.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan.
She’s literally describing the obvious and somewhat pathetic efforts Trump takes to hide “the effects of time.” Biden isn’t so vain that he walks around with a sick tribble on his head. He doesn’t slather himself with Oompa Loompa bronzer by Maybelline. He’s busy running the country. He also has a wife who loves him. That makes him well-adjusted not Methuselah.
The Washington Post confirmed four years ago that Trump uses (poorly) some discount Swedish face makeup. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed that Trump resisted wearing a mask during the height of the pandemic because it ruined his makeup. We can only imagine how the media would cover this if Trump were a woman politician over 70.
And it gets worse:
He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.
This reads like a Leni Riefenstahl script. It’s horrifying to see an American journalist associate “strength” with Trump’s fascist displays of public humiliation, cruelty, and bullying.
O’Brien makes it sound as if Trump wows the audience with dance moves like James Brown before a rousing show with multiple encores. The bias is clear: Biden holds his “upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty,” yet Trump stiffly waving his fists around is a “display of stamina.”
Saturday, at a rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked Nikki Haley’s marriage, claiming that her husband was MIA on the campaign trail with her. (Michael Haley is actually serving his country overseas.) Trump rambled for two hours about marbles and referred to 9/11 as 7-Eleven. At best, his rally speeches are less coherent than Abraham Simpson’s story about onions on his belt. Whenever Trump can latch onto a consistent theme, he actively promotes stochastic terrorism, including just prior to the January 6 Capitol attack. O’Brien calls this “macho rhetoric and bombast.”
Trump’s own gaffes are minimized with some eye-rolling junk science from Carol Kinsey Goman, a self-proclaimed authority on “leadership presence.” You’d think the Times would quote the generals who’ve worked with Trump and attest to how unhinged he is. Instead, we get this:
“It is the perception of how you communicate,” Goman said. “When Trump makes those kinds of faux pas, he just brushes it off, and people don’t say, ‘Oh, he’s aging.’ He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he does it with this bravado, it doesn’t seem like senility. It seems like passion.”
Biden seemed pretty damn passionate when he condemned Trump as an ongoing threat to democracy in January.
“Trump is big,” Ms. Goman said. “He simply takes over. He has that kind of full-charge-ahead persona that does correlate with being younger, healthier, more active. Biden doesn’t. He is a different kind of person. And, unfortunately, in this situation, it doesn’t work out well.”
Biden is president of the United States, who’s dealing with wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Americans should want a sober, staid leader with experience instead of a possibly coked-out man baby who frequently threw tantrums in the Oval Office.
O’Brien concedes that Biden acknowledges concerns about his age and is transparent about his health. A year ago, Biden’s longtime physician described him after an examination as a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male.” Trump is hardly upfront about his health, which O’Brien chalks up to his “typical hyperbole.”
In 2015, he released a hastily written doctor’s note declaring that if elected he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” In office, amid news reports of his erratic behavior, Mr. Trump asserted that he was actually a “very stable genius.”
That’s the person whose mental faculties we should question. O’Brien claims Trump’s “impulsiveness and willingness to go off-script in ways that can be messy only adds to his image as an unrehearsed, unvarnished chaos agent, a key source of his popularity with Republicans.” I know the so-called “liberal media” won’t dare question the judgment of Republican voters, but someone with the same character bio as Heath Ledger’s Joker is not a good fit for the presidency.
Verbal flubs by Mr. Biden, by contrast, undermine the image of experience, competence and professionalism that got him elected, and that even his supporters quietly fear may be slipping away.
Legitimate media shouldn’t amplify misinformation but provide clarity. The Alzheimer’s Association states that forgetting names, sometimes having trouble finding the right word, and even briefly confusing the day of the week are all typical age-related changes and not signs of dementia or serious cognitive decline. There’s zero evidence that Biden periodically forgets where he is or struggles to solve basic problems. He doesn’t throw ketchup at the walls.
Republican strategist Henry Barbour from Mississippi, who’s backing Haley, said, “Donald Trump is no young man, but he does seem to be, for the most part, on top of his game.” O’Brien lets that stand, of course. However, Trump’s “game” is fascism and lawlessness. Whenever the Times runs an article that ignores this basic fact, it’s no longer the “paper of record.” It’s a propaganda outlet for Donald Trump.
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This NYT bullshit is why I unsubscribed several years ago. WaPo is next. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, it dies in “both-sides are the same” when obviously they aren’t anywhere close.
The orange dotard is a convicted rapist, thief/embezzler, wannabe dictator, and helped an extra million Americans die from COVID due to his science denials & BS. Oh, and he separated thousands of children from their parents at the border with NO real tracking, many still have not been reunited. He clearly doesn't understand NATO, economics or basic human decency. DO BETTER MSM.