The Different Drummer

One Old Guy Out. One To Go?

The GOP successfully pushed a narrative that Biden is too old to be reelected. Will they now hold a 78-year-old Trump to the same standards?

“We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

– Nikki Haley, February 2021

The look on Biden’s face during the presidential debate was one that I was very familiar with…

My Dad was a workaholic who usually came home from work hours after the rest of the family had finished dinner. On nights when I saw his car pull into the driveway, I would head for the front door and wait for his key to open the first lock. Then as he put it into the second one I would quietly relock the first one. He nudged the door but it would not open.

“Damn,” I would hear my Dad exclaim just as he once again put the key into the deadbolt and turned it. The knob would turn but the door would not budge. I had already relocked its companion.

“CARL!”

With the jig up, I unlocked the door and opened it. My tired, exasperated father had the same look on his face that Biden had on his during last month’s debate. My Dad was dealing with a teenager who craved his attention; the President was dealing with his 78-year-old predecessor who responded to the questions being asked with answers that grew further detached from reality as the night went on.

Trump and his advocates had been setting the stage for months with a narrative that Biden was cognitively impaired; a fiction made easier by his lifelong stutter and his propensity for gaffes. When Biden clearly showed that this narrative was…