We complain a lot on this site, and with good reason, how the media focus on every Biden pause or stumble (sometimes even making them up) in an effort to make voters question whether an 80-year-old man is fit for office, no matter how much he shows he’s on top of his game, while at the same time ignoring Trump’s many slips, slides, slaps, and slumps, though he’s only 3 years younger than Biden, never exercises, and eats a diet that would give a cardiologist a heart attack.
Well, occasionally, there are media types who notice. Dean Obeidallah, who has a SiriusXM daily show, got away with posting this op-ed on CNN: Opinion: Trump’s gaffes should raise questions about his fitness for office
A Fox News poll released last week found that 52% of Americans don’t believe that 77-year-old Donald Trump has the “mental soundness to serve” as president. That same poll showed that 61% of Americans have the same concern about President Joe Biden, who is 80. But while there is extensive media coverage about Biden’s age and gaffes, Trump, for the most part, gets a pass.
Yes, he noticed. And he goes on to list just some of the recent gaffes:
After calling Biden “cognitively impaired” (talk about irony!), Trump claimed the president was leading us into World War II. Of course, that global conflict ended in 1945, a year before Trump was born.
As Obeidallah stresses, had this been Biden . . .
Again, if Biden had made those types of mistakes, many in the media likely would have covered them as part of the narrative that the octogenarian president lacks the mental soundness to do the job for another four years.
Obeidallah weakens his media critique by focusing on the 2020 election and arguing (correctly) that this alone makes him unfit for office. Even so, it’s one small step in getting the media to, just for once in this campaign cycle, commit journalism.
We need to encourage more of this, to demand it, really. And the DNC needs to start an ad campaign YESTERDAY comparing Trump’s flubs (and his flubby waistline) to Biden’s sharpness and trim. The time for playing nice passed when Nixon authorized covered up the Watergate burglary — and that was SIXTY over FIFTY years ago. We really should have learned this by now.
