I have had scores—yes, scores—of conversations with friends and acquaintances over the past two weeks, scores of conversations with my partner, and scores of conversations with myself. Each and every one of those conversations has had the same theme: Is Joe Biden too old and too compromised to serve as the president of the United States, and if so, oh my God.
It has been difficult to parse, because the White House is nothing if not opaque, and none of us has any sort of window into Joe Biden’s day-to-day functioning. This makes the Biden tea leaves difficult to read. His concerning performance on the debate stage, followed by a dodgy, dud of an interview with George Stephanopoulos, triggered an avalanche of opinions in flagship newspapers and on cable news outlets, and those opinions have been wildly divergent.
Complicating the discussion, at least at present, is that Biden’s less-than-impressive Stephanopoulos interview was followed by the reemergence of the energetic and passionate Joe Biden from days gone by. To put it plainly, he came out swinging. He was forceful, coherent, extemporaneous, and unequivocal: He would stay in the race as his party’s nominee and would not step aside.
There have been lots of questions about the purpose and frequency of Joe Biden’s medical exams, followed by a letter from his neurologist attesting to the fact that apart from neuropathy in his feet (which would explain the obvious hitch in his giddyap), he has no neurological impairment. We have been reassured that President Biden does not have Parkinson’s Disease (it never occurred to me that he did), but there was no reference to any testing for dementia.
In the meantime, while all of us—including the Chicken Littles of the free press—obsess on Biden’s fitness for office, what we have stopped talking about is his opponent’s fitness for office.
It is time for us to resume that discussion.
Has anyone noticed that the grandstanding, incoherent lout who is once again the nominee of the Republican Party has been uncharacteristically silent over the past two weeks? Instead of running his mouth, which is his typical modus operandi, he is golfing and enjoying the spectacle of the Democratic Party doing what it does best: freaking out and cannibalizing itself, with plenty of help from media pundits. Every day that Joe Biden’s perceived infirmities receive all their attention, Donald Trump’s glaring deficiencies recede into the background.
Biden may be old and inarticulate, but Donald Trump is also both of those things, and more. He is a habitual liar, a sexual predator, and a convicted criminal who stacked the Supreme Court with far-right ideologues who promptly ended the guarantee of abortion care for women, repeatedly undermined the bedrock principles of the United States Constitution, violated judicial ethics, ceded control of the Justice Department to the chief executive, and handed Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card for the multiple crimes he committed while in office. They are Trump’s court, and should Trump regain the White House, we will look back on those decisions as the first unambiguous harbingers of the death of our democracy.
Donald Trump is the prevaricating nincompoop who thought he could buy the country of Greenland; wanted to release alligators into the Rio Grande River to attack undocumented migrants; and urged his countrymen to disregard the advice of respected epidemiologists, suggesting instead that we all ingest horse deworming pills and disinfectants to cure COVID. Have we already forgotten that he deliberately fomented a bloody insurrection to remain in office after he lost the last election, then walked away with reams of highly classified documents that he refused to return and subsequently shared with who knows how many people? Apart from malign foreign actors, he represents one of the greatest ongoing national security threats to our country.
This is the man who is running against Joe Biden: a morally bankrupt, mentally ill, completely dishonest convicted criminal who has already demonstrated, over and over again, that he is unfit for office.
Perhaps it is we, the people, who have memory loss, and not Joe Biden.
Biden could end all of the speculation and handwringing by taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MCA), the same assessment administered to Donald Trump after a notably bizarre political appearance during which he seemed unable to navigate a ramp to the dais and was unable to hold a glass of water without using two hands. The MCA is brief and easy:
- Draw a clockface with the hands pointing to 11:10.
- Correctly identify pictures of three animals (lion, rhino, giraffe).
- Count backwards from 100 by sevens.
- Connect an alternating sequence of numbers and letters.
- Draw a cube.
- Recall the following words: face, velvet, church, daisy, red.
- Tell me today’s date.
- Tell me the name of this place, and what city it is in.
- List as many words beginning with “F” as you can think of.
This straightforward, unchallenging test is designed exclusively to detect severe cognitive decline. Donald Trump crowed about having aced his exam, without publishing the actual results, and because he is either unwilling or unable to ever tell the truth, we really have no idea of how well or how badly he performed.
Given the fact that Mr. Trump can’t string five words together without wandering into the weeds, and not long ago misidentified one of his sexual assault victims, E. Jean Carroll, as his former wife, Marla Maples, he hardly seems to be the apotheosis of mental clarity. Quite the opposite: He is “word salad” personified. It is beyond perplexing to watch him on the campaign trail, where he routinely veers off topic and starts gibbering about showers, toilets, electric motors, sharks, Al Capone, and shampoo. In any event, according to his own lights, Trump proclaimed that the results of the MCA confirmed his extraordinary intellectual acuity.
To repeat: It was not an intelligence test; it was a dementia screener.
Biden should take the MCA, administered by an independent neurologist, and promptly publish the unredacted results. If the results indicate dementia, then Biden should step aside to make room for a more coherent and charismatic Kamala Harris to take the stage. If the results are not indicative of dementia, then we all need to take a breath, stop freaking out, and work our tails off to make sure that he is reelected.
Joe Biden is an old man who has a stutter and a limp. Donald Trump is an old man who is an existential threat to democracy.
Get the memo.
