Agonizing About Biden’s Age Is Worse Than Irrelevant
The big issue in this election isn’t oldness and it isn’t character.
LAST WEEK’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS probably ought to put to rest discussions about Joe Biden’s senility and decrepitude. Yes, he really is very old and physically frail-looking these days—but he gave his speech in a sharp and vigorous manner. In a perverse bit of reverse-reverse psychology, Biden’s political opponents spent so many months building up his diminished capacity that anything but a desiccated corpse would have appeared vigorous compared to the low expectations they established. And he certainly seemed much more on the ball than Katie Britt in her weird histrionic Republican response.
Yet I have no illusion that any of this will change the discussion. Republicans switched seamlessly from claiming Biden is doddering and senile to claiming he must be on performance-enhancing drugs. And it’s not just the right. For months now, Biden’s age has been the white whale of the New York Times.
Of course, we could point out that Donald Trump is also ancient, just few years younger—excuse me, less old—than Biden, and he also suffers from memory lapses. But this is worse than irrelevant. All of these discussions about whether Biden or Trump are showing signs of an aging brain merely demonstrate how much people are missing the point of this election.
It would be closer to the mark to say that the character of each of the two men matters more than their cognition. Biden is not without personal failings, though his politicians’ compulsive quest for the middle ground on everything seems quaintly charming in today’s context. Donald Trump’s character defects are of a different sort altogether: He pals around with racists and antisemites, habitually lies, talks about military service with contempt, and is brazenly promising to abuse his power if elected. His own former chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, summed him up as “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Yet to focus on Biden’s and Trump’s character, just as to focus on their age, is to fail to understand the issue at stake in this election. This election is not about the personal merits or demerits of one man versus the other. It’s about the fundamental nature of the American political system, and their place in that system.
THE FRAMERS OF THE CONSTITUTION anticipated that deeply flawed, immoral, insanely ambitious, and foolish men could rise to positions of political power. (Alexander Hamilton was friends with, and then got shot by, one of them.) This is why they created a constitution that was designed to protect us from the flaws of any particular officeholder by limiting his power and enmeshing him within a system of checks and balances.
Donald Trump’s first impeachment is a perfect example of this system at work. The president of the United States tried to shake down a foreign leader by threatening to withhold congressionally mandated aid unless that leader would help frame Trump’s domestic political opponent. He was willing to sacrifice American national security for his own personal political advantage. But then what happened? He was ratted out by a whistleblower in the national security establishment, whose report was sent to Congress. The evidence was laid out for the American people to see, and Congress was able to vote on whether to charge Trump with abusing his power and remove him from office.
They blinked at that last part, but the whole process made clear how the president could be scrutinized by the other major branches of government. And not just by the other branches. Notice that the president faces scrutiny from within the executive branch, simply by virtue of having to act through a bureaucracy that is not composed entirely of his own lackeys.
This is partly a product of late-nineteenth-century civil service reforms that eliminated the “spoils system” in which politicians doled out jobs as prizes to their political supporters, which encouraged precisely the kind of electioneering corruption for which Trump was impeached the first time. It also reflects the larger design of the Constitution and particularly the requirement that the president obtain the “advice and consent” of the Senate for appointing top executive officials. The Founders drew on lessons from the long history of England’s contests between king and Parliament, in which Parliament realized it could limit the king’s power by controlling the appointment of his ministers. In the American system, the chief executive does not act alone; he acts through his cabinet officers. If those officers are vetted by the legislature, which insists that the president appoint people with experience and good reputations, they are less likely to act as his flunkies or to cooperate with him in corrupt schemes.
Donald Trump opposes every aspect of this system. That is why he has spent years railing against the “deep state.” What he is actually complaining about is that America’s constitutional order is not a system of one-man rule.
THIS IS THE REAL REASON WHY agonized discussion of the candidates’ ages or their personal characters misses the point. It is not just that Donald Trump’s threat to democracy—his promise to “be a dictator on day one”—is more important than Biden’s age. It is that our constitutional system is precisely what protects us from any such personal flaws in a chief executive. A president’s lapses in ability, competence, and even character have limited impact, so long as he is kept within the bounds of the system.
That’s why it’s not about the men, it’s about the system. One of the presumptive candidates for president this November wants to preserve our constitutional system, while the other wants to smash it to pieces.
The main lesson Trump and his supporters took from his first term is precisely that he was hemmed in by the system, so they are making plans to ensure that won’t happen in a second term. They want to make it easier for Trump to fire federal bureaucrats en masse, effectively re-establishing the spoils system and making most executive employees personally dependent on the favor of the president. Even more alarming is Trump’s claim of total presidential immunity from prosecution, combined with the certainty that he would simply order all federal cases against him to be dropped—then order a campaign of legal harassment against prosecutors in his state-level cases. This takes him outside the reach of the courts, and of course he has already rendered the threat of impeachment moot by showing that his partisan supporters will not impeach him for any crime.
As for the voters, Trump’s vow to pardon the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th indicates that he will be prepared to once against try to overturn election results he doesn’t like.
One by one, Trump has been knocking down all the counterbalances that hem in presidential power.
THIS IS ALSO WHY DISCUSSIONS about the policy differences between Trump and Biden are moot. Even granting the rather fanciful premise that Donald Trump has specific, well-developed policy ideas on, say, the economy, his agenda cannot be regarded the way we would look at the promises of an ordinary politician.
If we get four more years of Biden, we will get a leader with certain policy preferences—who will be constrained by political opposition and the many procedural roadblocks that tend to bog down a president. As we have seen on many issues, from guns to stimulus spending to student loans, this means that he won’t be able to get many of the things he wants. Few presidents ever do.
But if Trump wins and takes the approach he is promising, we will get him unconstrained by political opposition. That’s the whole point of being an authoritarian. He will be able to do all the worst things he is promising. But also, having asked for unchecked power in order to do specific things he promised to his supporters, he will have that power to do whatever he wants. This is the bait-and-switch all authoritarians use: Give me unlimited power so I can do the things you want—but once I have it, I’ll do the things I want.
So let’s dispense with the false equivalence that views Trump and Biden as simply two flawed candidates, and who can really tell the difference between them?
Here is the difference. Joe Biden has many flaws, which will be restrained and compensated for by the American system. Donald Trump has many flaws, which will be increasingly unrestrained.
That’s the choice. Anyone focusing on a different issue is missing the point.