Slips, trips and falls.
The slips and trips are bad. But it’s the falls that get you, especially if you’re old like me, or older.
Falls are the leading cause of fatal injuries among U.S. adults age 65 and over.
I’m over, by six years and counting. So I’m more interested in this medical reality than I was 20 or 30 years ago.
We also have a president who is 80 years old. So I was particularly interested a couple of weeks ago when I first watched a video clip of Joe Biden tripping — apparently over a sandbag holding a teleprompter stand — and falling on a stage at the U.S. Air Force Academy after handing out the last diploma of a graduation ceremony.
The president went down pretty hard, sort of landed on his right hip and got up fairly quickly with a brief pause and some help from an Air Force officer and a guy I assumed to be a Secret Service agent.
All told, it wasn’t too bad for a guy Biden’s age. No hint of any potentially deadly injury, or even a particularly serious one. And he looked just fine walking around and talking with people on the stage after he fell.
Later, he would joke to reporters that “I got sandbagged.”
Of course, the anti-Biden folks got positively giddy over the fall on social media, saying if was proof that the octogenarian is physically unfit to be president. That was a nice variation from their constant refrain that he’s mentally unfit.
Neither is true, of course. Biden is fine mentally. And he’s doing OK physically. He’s just old. His life-long stutter continues to give him some challenges, which can stop him in mid sentence and garble his words. And he has always had a tendency toward gaffes when he goes off script. That’s one of the reasons he doesn’t hold many press conferences, although I think he should hold more.
Things tend not to improve with age, especially once that age adds up to 70-plus years. And Biden is showing his age, most obviously in a stiff, cautious, short-stepped gait that has gotten more pronounced since he was inaugurated.
Remember Biden’s pretty casual, pretty smooth stroll with his wife and family on Pennsylvania Avenue during his inaugural parade? And remember his short jog over to the side of the street to give NBC’s Al Roker a fist bump? I doubt the president would try that jog these days. If he did, i’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look the same.
An old president is one thing; an insurrectionist is quite another
To be fair to Biden, I don’t recall ever seeing Donald Trump jog. I’m not sure he knows how.
Jog or not, being president is hard work. So is getting older when you’re pretty old to begin with. Put them together and we can watch an old guy like Biden age even more, day by day.
These days when he walks, Biden looks every bit his age.
So, sure, I wish our first-term president and the almost-certain Democratic nominee in 2024 wasn’t 80 years old, just as I wish the leading Republican challenger wasn’t 77. Even more than the age factor, however, I wish that same GOP challenger wasn’t the man who denied the results of a legal-and-fair presidential election, refused to participate in the nation’s historically sacred peaceful transition of power and inspired an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Yeah, that guy, the same man who continues to spread the election lie that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. And he seems fully capable of doing the same thing if he were to lose another presidential race. That ought to scare anyone. It certainly scares me.
The list of Republican presidential candidates is growing. And virtually any of the candidates who have announced or soon will announce would be a better, safer, more hopeful option than Donald Trump. Our U.S. senators, John Thune and Mike Rounds, obviously agree. They recently endorsed South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott over the former president.
That kind of endorsement, along with speaking truth to the power of Trump when he talks absolute nonsense, doesn’t help Thune and Rounds with Trump-loving constituents. It’s probably why Gov. Kristi Noem — who never criticizes or disagrees with Trump and talks and acts like him regularly — beat all other Republicans in a recent poll of GOP voters in South Dakota.
Excuse me while I take a moment to be depressed.
Sigh.
Is it reasonable to hope for a different result from GOP primary voters?
But back to Scott. I don’t know much about him. But he seems like a good man who cares about America, which is a pretty good place to start for a candidate. Scott also seems like a candidate with a greater-than-zero chance of being Trump. But only slightly greater than zero, I’d say.
So far, it doesn’t look good for the other Trump challengers, either.
So, if things play out as the odds suggests and the man who tried his best to blow up our system of government is the GOP nominee, what will Thune, Rounds and others like them do?
As loyal Republicans, they can be expected to pledge their eventual support to the Republican nominee. That’s just what most Republicans do. That’s what former Vice President Mike Pence did last week when he announced his own presidential run. He pledged to support his party’s nominee, with the hope that it would be him and with a prediction that, whoever it is, it won’t be Donald Trump.
But what if it is Trump, the man who inspired some of the Capitol insurrectionists to chant “Hang Mike Pence!”? During a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Pence recalled how Trump asked him in January of 2021 to choose Trump over the U.S. Constitution. Pence said he chose the Constitution. And he said anyone who puts himself above the Constitution should never be president.
Pence and I agree on that. But …
In a televised town hall, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Pence several times if he would support the GOP presidential nominee if it were Trump. Pence refused to answer that question directly, saying instead that he believed Trump would not be the nominee.
Pence says he trusts Republican voters to choose someone other than Trump in 2024.
I hope he’s right. But I have my doubts.
My guess is that Thune and Rounds have their doubts, too. I assume they still get swamped with angry responses whenever they show any sign of what fervent Trump followers interpret as disloyalty to the former president. The communicable disease of Trump love within the Republican Party is still highly infectious to many, despite the many reasons it shouldn’t be.
What will Rounds and Thune do about that?
If Trump is the nominee, would our senators write in someone else?
I don’t expect either of them to vote for Biden. But if Trump is their party’s nominee, I hope they can at least do what former Republican presidential candidate John Kasich did in 2016, after the Access Hollywood video came out late in the campaign showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Kasich called it “disgusting” and said he couldn’t vote for Trump. And he didn’t. The former two-term Ohio governor who also served nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives still voted a straight-Republican ticket. But for president Kasich wrote in John McCain, who was his party’s unsuccessful nominee for president eight years earlier against Barack Obama.
McCain, a Vietnam vet and former POW who served 31 years in the U.S. Senate, died in 2018. In 2016 McCain also expressed disgust at what the Access Hollywood video revealed about Trump and said he couldn’t vote for his party’s nominee that year.
McCain said he couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, either, and suggested he might write in the name of his friend, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. That was back when Graham was more of a reputable politician, before he caught the Trump fever and started to behave in a way that would embarrass his old friend, Sen. McCain.
And just imagine what McCain would have said about Trump had he witnessed — first hand as a member of the U.S. Senate — the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump’s role in it and his continuing lies about the 2020 election results.
If Trump is the GOP nominee, a write-in vote in the general election might be a nice option for Rounds and Thune, especially if they make their decision public.
Logic might dictate that Trump’s behavior before and since the insurrection should disqualify him for any serious consideration as the GOP nominee. Yet he wins by substantial margins all the popularity polls among Republicans likely to vote in the 2024 presidential primary.
The irrational passions of the Trump base
There is no logic in loving Trump. Nor is there any logic in his status as the frontrunner and the one most likely to win the GOP nomination. Logic seems to be missing, also, in the way Trump opponents in his own party are approaching the 2024 GOP primary.
By packing the primary race with candidates rather than coordinating support around one or two Trump rivals, the GOP seems content to let the Trump faithful rule the party once again. It’s shaping up to be a replay of the 2016 GOP primary, when a crowded slate of candidates helped lift Trump to the GOP nomination.
Trump’s base will remain solid. If the remainder of Republican voters are fragmented by multiple candidates, Trump will win.
Breathless, never-ending coverage of Trump by the mainstream media didn’t hurt the New York billionaire in his rise to power in 2016, either. That pattern seems to be repeating itself, too. And the historic recent indictments of Trump seem only to be strengthening him within his party.
His party. The party of Trump, not Lincoln or Reagan.
But it takes more than Republicans to elect a president. And many Republicans not afflicted with Trump adoration syndrome doubt he is their best bet to beat Biden. I think they have a point. A younger candidate with a plan for the future and a lot less baggage in the past seems like a much-wiser choice for the GOP.
Either way, I wouldn’t count out “Sleepy Joe” and his aging gait.
Sure, he has his periodic gaffes and has suffered some policy failings during the last 2 1/2 years. And his son Hunter has done him no favors.
But Joe Biden has also brought a degree of normalcy to the presidency that was missing under Trump. He has rebuilt crucial relations with long-standing allies. And he has had a nice assortment of other successes, the most recent being the deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to raise the debt ceiling, avoid a government default and impose some spending restraint.
The hard right and hard left rejected the deal, as you would expect. But reason prevailed across the middle, where Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema apparently did some quietly productive work.
Biden and McCarthy deserve most of the credit, however.
“Sleepy Joe” might have tripped on the graduation stage a couple of weeks ago, but he didn’t stumble in making that crucial deal with Congress.
And it’s those kinds of deals that just might get an old guy with an old-guy’s gait reelected to the most powerful office in the world.
