The Trump mental acuity test
Ian Millhiser of Vox recently observed that discussions in the mainstream and conservative press about Joe Biden’s mental acuity is “starting to take on the same character as the 2016 ‘but her emails’ coverage.” The idea is to “find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.”
I hope I don’t have to spend too much time explaining how outrageous this situation is. I hope most of my readers by now are fed to the teeth with the GOP’s obsession with bad faith attempts to distract with topics like Hunter Biden, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and “wokeness.” I hope everyone “gets,” without the need to have it explained, that the GOP needs to invent such scandals out of whole cloth and harp endlessly about them in order to distract attention away from the real scandals committed by their arch criminal and cult leader, Donald Trump.
That doesn’t make their distractions any less dangerous. “But her emails” was worth a million votes, and a million votes judiciously applied in the outmoded and rickety Electoral College system can easily result in the loss of a whole presidential election. So we need to take these attacks seriously, however overtly absurd they are.
And there’s little that is more absurd than a 77 year old, fat, drug-addled, word salad-uttering, fugue state-befuddled buffoon suggesting that a sleek, bike-riding octogenarian is somehow less compos mentis than he is. The fact that we let our own mainstream press get away with this bullshit without immediate pushback is unreservedly crazy-making.
But that 77 year old, fat, drug-addled, word salad-uttering, fugue state-befuddled buffoon may have just made a huge mistake. He challenged Joe Biden to a mental acuity contest. IQ tests at twenty paces, and may the best man win. Undignified, unpresidential as it seems, I suggest that Biden accept the challenge. Immediately.
It’s high time for that loud-mouthed bastard Trump to put his money where his piehole is. It’s time to accept his fake challenge as if it’s real and watch him squirm. At that point Trump will have exactly two choices. He will either go through with the challenge and lose badly, or he will try to weasel his way out of it. Either way the scumbag loses, and it will be a real pleasure to watch.
But one thing is for sure. If the President accepts the moron’s fake challenge, that will be the end of its destructive power. After all, Biden is going to have to go up against somebody in 2024, and whoever that turns out to be, the narrative of his mental fitness will be gone. If not, then the GOP will have to explain how it is that they once put forward Donald Trump as their leading candidate, someone whose mental acuity is provably inferior to Biden’s.
I know it’s probably not going to happen. In today’s play-it-safe politics, very few bold moves are ever made. But it would be wonderful if the President accepted the challenge anyway. It would be nice to watch that bastard Trump get the public butt-whipping he so desperately needs.
I guess I’ll just have to sit tight and watch Trump go to jail instead, which is, come to think of it, a very nice consolation prize. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.