By Daniel Lazare, Weekly Worker
With Biden’s senility all too obvious and Trump looking likely to win a second term, Daniel Lazare sees this as part of a long-term shift to the far right
Growing old is not for sissies, as Bette Davis once said. But it is especially painful if you are a US president up for re-election at the age of 81!
Joe Biden is in trouble these days for two reasons. One is that his all-too-visible deterioration is now front-page news from coast to coast. The other is that he is too pig-headed to admit that he is in no shape for a second term – a refusal to face reality that spells disaster for Democrats in November.
Reason number two flows inexorably from reason number one, because increasing stubbornness is often a by-product of the aging process – as are crankiness, memory loss and an ossified world view. These are qualities that America’s over-the-hill commander-in-chief has long displayed in abundance. But they only became official when a federal prosecutor named Robert K Hur issued a 400-page report explaining why he had decided not to charge Biden with unlawful possession of classified documents.
It is not that Biden did not do it. On the contrary, investigators found a box of top-secret documents in his Delaware garage, prima facie evidence that he is guilty of the crime. Rather, it is because he is too old to persuade a jury that he is mentally capable. As Hur put it, jurors would likely see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and would therefore not be inclined to convict him of “a serious felony that requires a mental state of wilfulness”.
The president, in other words, could not knowingly commit a crime because he does not know what he is doing. This is something that Donald Trump has been saying for months, to mounting Democratic fury. But denialism is now wearing thin – not only because of what Hur says, but because voters can see it with their own two eyes. The more Democrats insist that Biden is fine, that he is as sharp as ever, that he is fully up to the job, etc, the more voters suspect a cover-up. The result is irritation, impatience and a falling standing in the polls.
