How Biden Can Flip the ‘Acuity’ Script
Plus: ‘How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.’
Huge news from the cricket T20 World Cup in Texas yesterday, where the United States pulled off a remarkable upset against hugely favored former champion Pakistan.
We’ve always considered cricket essentially a silly tedious version of baseball for countries that drive on the wrong side of the road. And we still think that, but still: USA! USA! Happy Friday.
Take the Test, Joe!
A few months ago, JVL wrote that Team Biden should “hang a lantern” on the president’s advanced age. “Biden can’t defuse the political problems his age creates for him. But he can mitigate them,” he argued. “It’s important that Biden take ownership of ‘elderly’ . . . Don’t be defensive about the age and don’t complain about the media fixating on it.”
We’ve been thinking about that good advice a lot during the latest round of Biden Acuity Discourse, kicked off this week by a provocative Wall Street Journal report: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”
In many ways, it was a preposterous piece. Supposedly heavily reported—“based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months”—the Journal got most of its juice from Republicans with a political interest in portraying Biden as doddering and feeble, particularly House Speaker Mike Johnson and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. (The McCarthy lines were particularly funny given the ex-speaker spent his final round of negotiations with Biden, during last year’s debt-ceiling fight, telling reporters how sharp and tough the president was.)
But maybe the most striking thing about the piece was how anxious Team Biden plainly was about it. The White House spent the reporting period micromanaging congressional Democrats’ comments:
After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths.
“They just, you know, said that I should give you a call back,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, referring to the White House.
And Biden aides spent the following days working the refs, sharing commentary accusing the Journal of journalistic malpractice.
Many of Biden’s allies have convinced themselves that voter fears about Biden’s age are ultimately attributable to one of two things: a barrage of slanted messaging from Republicans and an over-credulousness on the matter from mainstream media.
Is it fair for them to have gripes about this? Of course it is! It’s a huge messaging difficulty that the Biden portrayed in right-wing media is essentially just a collage of his oldest-seeming senior moments stitched together—with a bunch of totally fabricated ones tossed in for good measure.
But by fixating too much on GOP chicanery, Biden’s allies risk missing the forest for the trees. A huge portion of voter concern over Biden’s age is simply attributable to the fact that Biden is extremely old! Concerns about his age were already percolating during the 2020 Democratic primary four years ago. Go back and watch clips from that time—there’s zero question whatsoever Biden presents as older today than he did then.
If Biden’s allies could remember that some voter concern over the president’s age is reasonable, then they might also realize that many voters who share that concern can be reasoned with. And if that’s the case, then the best course of action for managing those concerns isn’t to get prickly and defensive whenever age and acuity questions arise, but to address those questions head on.
Here’s one modest proposal: Why doesn’t the president take an acuity test?
Biden passed on taking such a test back in February alongside his annual physical, with the White House saying his doctors had determined one was unnecessary. “He passes a cognitive test every day,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the time.
Might taking such a test appear overly defensive? Maybe—if it didn’t also present the opportunity for Biden to do a little attacking of his own.
After all, recall that Donald Trump did take a cognitive test while president—and, because he’s Donald Trump, instantly integrated that test into his battery of personal boasts. During the summer of 2020, it seemed like Trump couldn’t do an interview on any topic without shoehorning in how proud he was of his performance on that test.
“The first questions are very easy,” Trump bragged then. “The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question. It’s like, you’ll go: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah. It’s person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’”
“If you get it in order, you get extra points.”
Incredibly, Trump has still been strutting around this years-old test this cycle. “I took it, and I aced it,” he said in New Hampshire back in January. “They have plenty of tough stuff, those last 15, 20 questions.”
There is fertile ground here! So why not take the test? Why not lean into it? Even cut an ad about it! Republicans have been saying lots of ridiculous things about my mental sharpness, the president might say to the camera. So I figured I’d take this very tough test I keep hearing my opponent brag about.
If he passed it, rolling his eyes throughout, he’d be accomplishing several things at once: Vouching for his own sharpness, needling his famously vain and thin-skinned opponent, and spotlighting the ridiculousness of one-sided age coverage in a race where Trump is only a few years younger than he is.
The potential political upside is strong. If they keep passing on the opportunity, the White House can’t exactly complain if there’s still voters out there who wonder: won’t he, or can’t he?
—Andrew Egger
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‘The Savior of the People’
One of the most moving moments of yesterday’s commemoration of D-Day was an exchange between Ukraine’s president Volodomyr Zelensky and a U.S. veteran of Normandy. “You’re the savior of the people,” the veteran told Zelensky, grasping his hand and pulling him down to his wheelchair for a hug. “You bring tears to my eyes.”
“No, no!” Zelensky replied. “You saved Europe.”
“I pray for you,” the veteran said.
That veteran and his brothers—they did save Europe.
But of course that salvation was not forever. It could not be. In this world of ours, there are no wars to end all war. There is no worldly salvation that permanently overcomes evil.
And so, as Zelensky pointed out this morning to the French parliament, war has returned to Europe:
We live in a time when Europe has again ceased to be the continent of peace, unfortunately. The time of Nazism is returning. The time when cities are destroyed and villages are burned in Europe . . . Look at what Russian occupation means: burned, empty ruins of our cities and villages . . . Look at what Putin is making his own country and his people into.
President Biden also addressed the present moment in his fine remarks yesterday at the American Cemetery. He stressed the great achievements of the post-World War II order. But he also noted that:
We know the dark forces that these heroes fought against 80 years ago. They never fade. Aggression and greed, the desire to dominate and control, to change borders by force—these are perennial. And the struggle between a dictatorship and freedom is unending.
President Biden continued by asking several questions:
In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now the question for us is: In our hour of trial, will we do ours?
We’re living in a time when democracy is more at risk across the world than at any point since the end of World War II—since these beaches were stormed in 1944.
Now, we have to ask ourselves: Will we stand against tyranny, against evil, against crushing brutality of the iron fist?
Will we stand for freedom? Will we defend democracy? Will we stand together?
These questions are perennial. But they are particularly urgent today.
D-Day reminds us of courage and heroism, of achievement and triumph.
But it’s also a reminder of failure. It’s a reminder of the failures of the interwar period, of the failures of the democracies to act to check aggression and barbarism when they would have been easier to check, of the failures that made the sacrifices of D-Day necessary.
Earlier this week, I was looking at Churchill’s World War II history to see what he had to say about D-Day.
And I was reminded that Churchill places at the front of his final volume, Triumph and Tragedy, a kind of epigraph, which he calls the “Theme of the Volume.” It’s this: “How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.”
Triumph or folly? Watching the ceremonies this week has been a reminder that both paths remain before us.
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
U.S. hiring rises strongly, with 272,000 jobs added in May: New York Times
Biden meets with Zelensky in Paris, apologizes for delay in U.S. weapons that let Russia make gains: NBC News
As nuclear power flails in the U.S., White House bets big on a revival: Washington Post
GOP candidates in governor races pivot on abortion: Axios
Inside the ill-fitting, occasionally chaotic, decidedly solid Biden-Macron relationship: Politico
Inside the culture clash upending the Washington Post: Politico
Quick Hits: A Conspiracy Theory of Western Decline
“The latest sensation in the ‘heterodox’ media ecosystem,” Cathy Young writes for the site today, “is a long essay by celebrated author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali titled ‘We Have Been Subverted.’”
“In fact, the essay is notable mainly for one thing: It represents a startling plunge, for Ali and evidently for the Free Press, into outright, unabashed conspiracy theory.” Cathy breaks it down as only she can:
The core of Ali’s argument is that much of today’s social and cultural turmoil in the United States and more generally in Western countries—or, at least, the destabilizing trends on the left—are the product of deliberate anti-Western subversion. While Ali makes the disclaimer that not everyone advancing the ideas she considers destructive (for example, a teacher who bring racial identity politics into the classroom) is knowingly working for the conspiracy, she believes that even they are unwittingly participating in processes that were set in motion by the West’s enemies and have taken on a momentum of their own.
And who are those enemies of the West? Ali identifies a trifecta: American Marxists, who have switched from Soviet communism to “cultural communism” (a “fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles”); “radical Islamists” represented by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Chinese Communist Party. She also believes that “Vladimir Putin is currently waging his own subversion campaign by supporting and advancing the three other forces.”
What makes Ali’s conspiratorial turn so unfortunate is that her critique of toxic cultural trends in America and the West is often on point. Yes, shunting fourth-graders into “racial affinity” groups and having them map their “oppressor” and “oppressed” identities is bad. Yes, focusing on Thomas Jefferson’s slave ownership while giving short shrift to the liberatory politics of the American Revolution that eventually paved the way for the abolition of slavery can invite what Ali calls “civilizational self-loathing”—the idea that America and the West are no better than authoritarian societies around the world, or even uniquely evil. Yes, the embrace of Hamas by many social justice activists in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel exposed the movement’s moral bankruptcy, and the emergence of groups like “Queers for Palestine” which try to blend a Hamas-friendly worldview with an LGBT-friendly one is a spectacular case of intersectionalist idiocy. Yes, the movement for transgender equality raises some difficult questions—about women’s sports, single-sex spaces, puberty blockers, etc.—that often get labeled “transphobic” instead of being given a nuanced look. Yes, the push to destigmatize nontraditional sexuality can lead to almost certainly unhealthy trends like the romanticization of polyamory. And so on.
The problem is with Ali’s explanation for these tendencies, which amounts to a Grand Unified Theory of Subversion. Here, she relies on the late Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who once worked for the Novosti news agency in India (and, covertly, for the KGB), defected in 1970, eventually settled in the United States, and devoted his career to talking about Soviet subversion. Bezmenov, who died in 1993, claimed that the KGB’s real agenda was not espionage but the slow infiltration, demoralization, and subversion of Western societies from within by means of hijacking, corrupting, and replacing these societies’ values.
We can’t include it all here, obviously, but we definitely recommend reading the whole thing—Cathy goes chapter and verse.
Cheap Shots
“There is fertile ground here! So why not take the test? Why not lean into it? Even cut an ad about it! Republicans have been saying lots of ridiculous things about my mental sharpness, the president might say to the camera. So I figured I’d take this very tough test I keep hearing my opponent brag about.”
Although I agree with you in theory, I think the cognitive test is a bad idea; it plays right into The MAGAt’s hands by having Biden’s team play defense.
And regardless of the outcome, the MAGAt’s won’t accept the results. They’ll say the process was rigged and the doctor was complicit.
We’ve seen this movie before with Obama and the Birther Movement. Even after Obama showed his long-form birth certificate, the MAGAt’s said it was a forgery.
Bottom line: Biden is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He doesn’t need to reach the MAGAverse, just cater to the independents and swing voters who aren’t as politically ignorant as the majority of this population.
If anything, Biden’s team should respond by saying the only people in need of a cognitive test is when a doctor suspects the patient has dementia. Biden’s doctor said he’s fine, apparently Trump’s doctors thought Trump may not be.
As for cheap shots? Was anyone truly expecting a different response from Trump? The man has no shame, and will burn down the house with all of us in it, if it serves his own selfish interests.
There's no possible mental test that will satisfy MAGA. Any success will just move the goalposts. Any chasing these goalposts will be taken as tacit proof of the accusations. The only way to win is to not play.