Amid the press frenzy about Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, it is worth remembering one thing. Trump and the MAGA Republicans aren’t concerned about what Biden is unable to do. They are enraged about what Biden has and will do. It isn’t that he can’t do the job. It’s that he does a job that they disagree with.
The shamelessly partisan shots at Biden taken by the special prosecutor, a Trump appointee–who was charged with investigating Biden’s handling of documents, has generated the media carnival. Joe Biden – like Donald Trump – is old. Like Trump, he shows signs of it. But the question isn’t one of “competence.” It is one of values and direction.
The shamelessly partisan shots at Biden taken by the special prosecutor, a Trump appointee–who was charged with investigating Biden’s handling of documents, has generated the media carnival. Joe Biden – like Donald Trump – is old. Like Trump, he shows signs of it. But the question isn’t one of “competence.” It is one of values and direction.
There are no questions his aides worried about Reagan’s decline and worked to protect him. Reagan held fewer press conferences than any other president since 1929 and fewer and fewer as the years went by. The journalist Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan for years, wrote: “The sad, shared secret of the Reagan White House was that no one in the presidential entourage had confidence in the judgment or the capacities of the president.” His aides (according to Jane Meyer) even discussed whether they should invoke the 25th Amendment to replace him in office.
Whatever the case of his mental acuity, the Reagan White House operated. The administration carried on. The problem with Reagan wasn’t his mental acuity – it was his values and his agenda. He cut taxes on the rich, rolled back protections on clean water, air, and food, sought to weaken unions, opposed raising the minimum wage, and doubled the military budget in peacetime even as he slashed basic security support for the most vulnerable.
The problem wasn’t that he couldn’t get things done. The problem was the things he wanted done made the country more unequal, more divided, and far meaner.
Similarly, Donald Trump’s erratic and chaotic years in office led many of his aides to speculate about his mental capacity. Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” included statements by former White House strategist Steve Bannon and other aides that exposed the president as a semi-literate, deeply angry man with a nanosecond attention span who was mentally in decline.
Trump’s White House was particularly dysfunctional. His policies were erratic and often unpredictable. His rages at his own aides were quite public. His monumental failure in dealing with the pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
In the end, however, it wasn’t Trump’s mental fitness that was the problem. He cut taxes largely on the rich at a time of extreme inequality, rolled back environmental regulation, denied the reality of climate change, pumped up the military while denigrating our allies, and sought to divide America on the basis of race, national origin, and religion. And he set out to place partisans in the Courts who ended up gutting the Voting Rights Act and depriving women of the right to choose. The substance of Trump’s agenda was far more destructive than the decline of his mental powers.
The assault on Biden’s age and capacity is a classic Trump ploy. He habitually accuses others of doing what he is guilty of. If he’s vulnerable because of his erratic mental state, then he ramps up the charges against Biden to blunt the criticism.
The reality is clear, however. The choice isn’t about capacity; it is about values and direction. Biden supports women’s right to choose; Trump does not. Biden supports working people, empowering unions, and lifting the minimum wage. Trump does not. Biden has launched historic initiatives to address the existential threat of climate change. Trump would eradicate them.
Biden seeks to strengthen voting rights and civil rights. Trump seeks to discredit elections, find ways to curb the right to vote, and roll back civil rights. Biden seeks to make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. Trump wants to cut the IRS’s ability to audit the taxes of the wealthy. This list can go on.
Both Trump and Biden are old. Both show signs of aging. One seems well-balanced; the other unhinged. But the real choice isn’t about their mental state. It is about their values and their agenda. And if they become the nominees of their parties, voters must decide which direction they want to pursue. On that, the choice is utterly clear.
You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.
©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
**********
Thank you for reading Jesse Jackson’s article on scoopusamedia.com. To read additional articles of interest, please subscribe to Scoop USA Media. Print subscriptions are $75.00 and online subscriptions (Print, Digital and Vizion) are $90. (52 weeks/1 year)
