Our president is not well
What does that mean for us?
I am not sure you can look at this footage and conclude that this man is really capable of being President of the United States:
In case it’s not clear, it takes Joe Biden literally 30 seconds, from start to finish, to get his coat on. That’s a long time. There are a lot of replies to the RNC’s tweet defending the man from this criticism: “It would appear that the wind is catching his jacket, and since he's nearly 80 years old he's not quite as flexible as he used to be.” “When he puts first arm in wind whips jacket around & hard to reach so his wife helps. Pretty normal behavior.” Uh huh. As Chesterton put it: The lunatic is “the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole.” I suppose you can look at this video and conclude that this weird slow-motion fail is “normal,” but you can’t readily conclude that it is fit for the presidency.
There’s always the guy who needs one more example to truly feel convinced, and I could just keep on providing clip after clip here—of Biden’s frequent inability to form coherent sentences, his tendency to shake hands with thin air, his obviously comprehensive physical and mental decline—but there’s not a whole lot of point to that. I think everybody’s seeing the same thing here. No need to beat…well, you know.
I am not sure what to do about this and I don’t think anyone is. The idea of putting Joe Biden out to pasture and bringing in Kamala Harris from the dry lot seems too quaintly awful to even consider, and I think it’s a safe bet that most voters—most Democrats, even—feel the same way. She is just the worst. So I sort of favor just keeping him where he is, pumping him full of Pedialyte every few hours, and letting him finish out his term with some dignity, if he can find it.
That being said, there are a few instructive political lessons of which we can take note here:
First, this serves as a re-affirmation that Donald Trump is the most potent and relentless political force in American history since the Civil War. Nobody moves the needle like him. The entire political firmament of our country has revolved completely on his axis for the past seven years or so. Nearly everyone, but especially Democrats, bases nearly everything they do on what Trump does—and President Joe Biden remains a testament to Trump’s utterly unstoppable political dominance: So desperate were Democrats to get Trump out of office that they nominated a man who, let’s just be brutally honest, puts on his suit coat like he’s coming out of the memory ward.
Second, everyone involved in this charade is frankly guilty of elder abuse. That seems inescapable at this point. Jill Biden in particular has exhibited a shocking dereliction of duty as a wife. I’m not saying I want Joe Biden out of there—but what I want shouldn’t matter to a wife, especially one whose husband is falling apart before her eyes. You take those vows for a reason. She should’ve had him out last October, though I suspect that Jill Biden, MA, EdD, MEd, is really enjoying the sense of genuine power that’s probably eluded her for the whole of her career. And if a man’s wife isn’t going to save him, you can be sure that his courtiers aren’t going to do it either. After this uncomfortable term is over, everyone should be taken to elder court, tried under elder torts, and put into elder prison over this whole charade.
Third, we still have a long way to go. Joe Biden theoretically won’t be out of office until January of 2025 at the earliest. That’s quite a long way away—that’s a lot of coats to put on, a lot of hands to shake, a lot of thousand-yard stares. However bad you think this is right now, rest assured it is probably going to get a lot worse. How likely do you think it is that Joe Biden is suddenly going to get better, that he’s going to experience a cognitive revival and re-become the goofy, capable Delaware lout that the Onion used to poke good-natured fun at for years?
The Onion doesn’t really have the stomach anymore to write anything about Joe Biden, these days they’re little more than court eunuchs and fluffers, but even if they had the integrity, I think Biden’s decline is rapidly straying into out-of-bounds territory. It’s not funny, it’s horrifying.
What I’m trying to say is: Adjust your expectations if you haven’t already. Consider the next two-and-a-half years less a part of Biden’s political career and more of a sad, weird coda, like how Francis Ford Coppola sees the third Godfather movie. The next 30 months are not going to be a wild ride; they’re going to be a sad, slow one, painful to watch, awful to contemplate. This is not normal.