U.S. President Joe Biden and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump participate in a presidential debate hosted by CNN on June 27, in Atlanta.Gerald Herbert/The Associated Press
President Joe Biden is very old. He will be older still in four years.
Despite his apparent incapacitation, the deeply unsettling debate performance that made his mental state impossible to ignore and the fretful recrimination it unleashed within his party, Mr. Biden has so far refused to stand down as the Democratic nominee for president.
His speech is frequently muddled. His thoughts, too. He stared off into space open-mouthed when he wasn’t speaking during the debate, as though he wasn’t quite present.
In the weeks since, he’s mostly gone to ground rather than making unscripted appearances to prove that night was the aberration he says it was.
He recently uttered the following sentence, verbatim: “We’d be able to make sure that all those things we need to do – child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID, with, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.”
He was caught plagiarizing chunks of speeches a couple of times, and he has exaggerated his meagre academic accomplishments. He’s also prone to saying things he shouldn’t – too honest sometimes, stumblingly inappropriate at others – as a self-admitted “gaffe machine.”
So that’s one side of the ledger.
Now.
Former president Donald Trump is very old, though three years less old than Mr. Biden. He will be older still in four years.
Despite the fact that he attempted to incite an insurrection after losing the last election and has refused to commit to peacefully accepting the results of the next one, his actions have unleashed no fretful recrimination within his party and no serious suggestions that he should step down.
His speech is frequently muddled because he lurches from one sentence fragment to another. His thoughts are the same. He was confident and strong at the debate as he unfurled an endless toilet paper roll of lies and nonsense.
In the weeks since, he too has mostly gone to ground, because why interrupt the constant, breathless coverage of Mr. Biden’s weaknesses?
Mr. Trump recently uttered the following sentence, verbatim: “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now under water and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’ By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, you notice that? A lot of shark. I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.’”
What is there even to say about Mr. Trump uttering things he shouldn’t? It’s the whole point of him – you might as well complain that water is wet.
He lies about virtually everything: his wealth, Democrats murdering already-born babies, whether it rained at his inauguration, how much the Boy Scouts love him, his governing record on the environment, the economy and COVID-19. Lies about huge, meaningful issues and other things so petty that you wonder why he even bothers.
He is the defendant in so many court cases covering so many different flavours of alleged skulduggery that there are flowcharts to keep track of them, like some kind of demented tournament bracket.
Convicted felon 34 times over for hush-money payments to a porn star. Three more criminal cases on the go, prosecuting him for federal election interference, state election interference and mishandling classified documents. A US$5-million judgment in civil court that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, then an additional US$83-million judgment because he wouldn’t stop hurling insults about it.
And here is the problem: There is no scale to meaningfully compare Mr. Trump’s behaviour to that of anyone else.
He has discovered or invented the magic of training the world to grade you on your own curve. There’s a flattening, deadening quality to it all – each terrible thing smears away the one before it and ensures the next is met with glazed eyes. If you’ll say and do anything, then nothing you say or do matters in the slightest. No one even pauses any more.
Be honest: Didn’t Mr. Trump’s laundry list of sins above get really boring really fast? Yeah, we know, we all watched it happen, what do you expect?
It is a problem – a big one – that Mr. Biden doesn’t appear cognitively fit and that he and the people around him are refusing to grasp or respond to that reality.
But it is not even close to as big a problem as everything else Mr. Trump gleefully barfs onto the public whenever the mood strikes. As Adam Serwer argued with unsparing clarity in The Atlantic recently: “It is obviously, incontestably true that a senile president with a competent and ethical staff would be preferable to an authoritarian one who wants to fill his administration with guys who sound like school-shooter manifestos.”
But this is not how we’re processing the relative sins of the two men. We might not even be able to fully see Mr. Trump’s heinousness any more – it’s so dependable that it’s invisible.
The pundits have spent the past two weeks gnawing obsessively on the Biden problem because it’s novel and because it lands at the feet of people expected to behave in a basically rational and decent manner. Everyone keeps screaming, “Do something!” at the Democrats because it seems like they might.
Donald Trump and his Republican Party float languidly free of any such expectations.
The man himself called it long ago. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Mr. Trump told an Iowa rally crowd in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”
Forget losing voters. Mr. Trump has so thoroughly inured the world to his malfeasance that it’s not clear anyone would even scold him for such a thing any more.