The president is simply withering away before our eyes, as though he drank from the wrong grail at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
One thing that has been on my mind for weeks now — brooding in the background as a potentially splenetic 4,000-word long-form blurt of acute psychological and civic discomfort — is the decay of President Joe Biden happening before our very eyes during the calendar year 2023. I went back to when I first joined National Review full-time to read what I was saying about it (as recently as February of this year) and to see how my references to it progressed to the present day, and two things were immediately clear: (1) I really had a lot to learn about writing back then, and (2) my concern — beyond partisan politics, just as observation — has been escalating from that time all along, not merely upward in a straight line, but accelerating exponentially. Not because I like Joe Biden, mind you, but because I like America. And when America’s president is currently already bobbing mentally like an untethered buoy out to sea, the idea of a major party renominating him is just an act of civic insanity.
Are the Democrats really going to do this? Are they going to ask Americans to vote for this? It seems they are. Americans have every right to say no.
Earlier this week I went back to videos of Biden’s public appearances — not outtakes from the 1987 or 2000 or 2008 or 2020 campaigns, mind you (look, Joe Biden has run for president a lot of times), but just from the start of his presidency. That was when I first got raked over the coals, while watching Biden’s slurred, half-attentive delivery during his Afghanistan withdrawal speech, for asking whether you could see this guy actually running for reelection in 2024. That was in 2021 — the man practically looks whipcrack-smart and youthful by comparison with today. The decay from that day to now (even just the public collapse from early 2023 to the present moment) is shocking. The visible aging, the increasing unsteadiness in gait, the sagging posture, the depressingly accelerating mental dissipation in all public appearances: Joe Biden is simply withering away before our eyes, as though he drank from the wrong grail at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
It’s not funny, though, because, like it or not, he is our president, he may well technically be our president for the next four years (or less), and I doubt China will feel much compunction about his mental state or the legalities of transferring power in a crisis under the 25th Amendment when it comes to their Taiwan calculus. (I am in fact certain they will take it into consideration, which is quite different from saying that they will feel no compunction about it.)
The next presidential election, I remind you, is 13 months from now. The winner’s term is four years, unless death or incapacitation intervenes. I would prefer to be delicate in pointing to the obvious implications rather than drag out the railroad spike and sledgehammer it down, but I will say once again that 2024 seems set to be a rematch of two advanced septuagenarians that the vast majority of Americans neither want as choices nor are capable of avoiding. I hope Senator Dianne Feinstein’s death today (which Jim Geraghty wrote eloquently about) serves as a reminder — not just to Democrats but to Americans as a whole — of what a tragedy it can be when those long since rendered unfit for high public office by the cruel passage of time are allowed to remain in that position. If you can no longer properly serve your citizens, whom do you serve?