President Joe Biden challenged Donald Trump to a debate via social media video: remember this?
Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020. Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 15, 2024
Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again.
Well, make my day, pal. pic.twitter.com/AkPmvs2q4u
"Well, make my day, pal."
Biden performed so badly at that debate that he's been forced out of the race. It's interesting to read pieces about Biden before the debate, like this one from the New York Times. Jason Farago certainly had a lot to say about Biden two days before:
New York Times — TWO DAYS BEFORE THE DEBATE
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) July 23, 2024
When [Biden] shouts down hecklers at the State of the Union, or kibitzes in his aviators with officials half his age, he leans into this archetype of leader as senex, like Homer’s Nestor, Titian’s Farnese pope or Alec Guinness’s Jedi.…
"… or Alec Guinness’s Jedi. Wise, perhaps wily. Full of life, if maybe long-winded."
Farago wrote:
“Watch me,” President Biden likes to say when he’s asked — he’s asked a lot, these days — whether he is too old to serve a second term. He is getting his wish.
For the first three years of his administration, in contrast to the last president’s chaotic omnipresence, Mr. Biden kept himself scarce. Now his smallest appearance brings with it a thousand remote diagnoses from armchair gerontologists. A major speech, like his State of the Union address in March, is assessed not for its policy but its fluidity as spoken-word performance. A minor gaffe, like bungling a single sentence at a Philadelphia rally in April, is dissected as possible evidence of decline.
He is facing an image problem that time exacts on everyone. Now the first presidential debate of 2024 is happening months earlier than usual, in part because the Biden campaign wants to overcome a mounting concern that the president, at 81, is not up to four additional years of service. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre” — or so Philip Roth’s “Everyman” howled in 2006. Electorally, this year, it might be both.
He got his wish all right.
These fictional writers have wild imaginations!
— Shadow🇺🇸 (@jaykay_jay) July 23, 2024
The cheap fakes came from the news media.
— Pōru (@poru208) July 23, 2024
Ahh the good old days when he was the best Biden ever…less than a month ago.
— Larry Sellers (@larry_sell38385) July 23, 2024
Did you need a cigarette after that? 🤮
— Denise (@neeceetx) July 23, 2024
NFW. You're making this up. Aren't you...?
— Adam Smith's Invisible Hand (@SmithsHand5309) July 23, 2024
Fan fiction masquerading as journalism
— Paul Lundin (@PaulLundin2) July 23, 2024
Dude, that sounds like a paragraph from someone's art history degree dissertation
— Tom Sellman (@d1srespectful1) July 23, 2024
Dear Penthouse Forum,
— Henson Stephanie (@HensonStephani2) July 23, 2024
I used to think these letters were fake until this happened to me. He was shouting down hecklers at the State of the Union when ours eyes locked, he was kibitzing in his aviators…
How many drinks do you have to have to write this 💩? The next thing you know they are going to tell us is how smart Kamala is. Oh wait 🙈
— Theo Manos (@manost) July 23, 2024
Anyone who writes something like that and avoids writing about the obvious mental decline of a president should be working at a fast food drive thru, not a major newspaper. Elite education destroys brain cells.
— TexasPatriot (@Richard22980) July 23, 2024
Now Biden disappeared to his Delaware beach house for so long that people started asking for proof of life.
Farago added, "But the perception of his age has become desperately entangled with cultural connotations of elderliness, formed over centuries, handed down to us through religion and literature and art." No, it was handed down to us through "cheap fakes."
It's good to remember how the media were selling Biden as the very best version of Biden there'd ever been and questioning his mental acuity was not allowed.
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