One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.
Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence. On Wednesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, tried echoing Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
And Trump himself, in his Tuesday night victory speech, reflected wistfully on his time in office as one in which “our country was coming together.”
I dunno - personally I think his age is a whole third thing. There’s: (a) I am alive and healthy and well and President, there’s (b) I am dead now, so control passes over to my VP, while I go sit in my coffin for… forever, and then (c) I am old and so while I seem to be health enough on most days, I am also unreliable in that at any time I could zone out and miss a crucial detail in a meeting, before having to make decisions with literally nuclear consequences.
A vote for Biden would hopefully, in practical terms, translate into a vote to separate out the Commander-In-Chief role (that needs a much more active presence than e.g. a mere speaker behind a podium) from the other aspects of the Presidency, except that is simply not how the Presidency is defined.
And, I should point out, the former at least has some hope of working out the way we might want it to, whereas for Trump there is no hope at all that he would not hold on tightly to the reigns of power, and he could literally decide to assassinate someone on a mere whim, again.
There’s also Regan’s, and likely Trump if he wins, d) “I’m basically a vegetable being propped up by advisors.”
(he said the quiet part out loud:-P)