For the love of God, someone please help Joe Biden up the stairs.
It would be, and I say this in all sincerity, a national disaster if Biden seriously hurt himself after needlessly walking up a giant flight of stairs alone to get on Air Force One. Would you let your septuagenarian grandfather or father walk up those stairs? Help the man.
Joe Biden just fell 3 times in a row trying to go up the stairs to Air Force One pic.twitter.com/gTUTckUH32
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 19, 2021
Not one of us is immune to the consequences of time, and Biden is not only the oldest president in American history, he’s also older than any of the past four living presidents right now. While no one should recklessly speculate about a person’s health, it is completely reasonable to note a politician’s age and acuity in public life. The national political media seems to agree, as long as the president happens to be a Republican.
You may recall that after Donald Trump was caught gingerly walking down a ramp at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point last year, an entire news cycle was spent pondering his health. “The president also appeared to have trouble raising a glass of water to his mouth during a speech at West Point a day before he turned 74,” reported the New York Times, “the oldest a president has been in his first term.”
CNN even covered Biden mocking Trump: “Look at how he steps and look at how I step. Watch how I run up ramps and he stumbles down ramps. Come on.”
On liberal infotainment shows like Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski claimed that walk had “sparked some concerns” about Trump’s health, to which Joe Scarborough responded that there were “a lot of people talking about the president’s health” and such talk “undercuts” the Republican “argument that Biden is an old man.”
Fact: Joe Biden is an old man.
Democrats have tried to blame Biden’s failing memory and incoherence on a childhood stuttering problem – “facts” become “fat” and so on. This ailment only made a significant appearance in the narrative in 2020, around 50 years into his political career, though it had apparently induced the president into a lifetime of fabulism and nonsensical assertions. This is a bit different. It certainly doesn’t help that Biden was allowed to spend the entire 2020 campaign hiding from reporters, and then refusing for months to give a single press conference. Only this past week, Biden seemed to forget Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s name and called Kamala Harris the president again. We don’t know what all that means about his mental sharpness. We rarely see him. But we all know how such events would be covered if the president were a Republican.