Childish Candidates and the US Presidency

Presidential debates are generally illuminating performances. The multi-person primary debates allow voters to get a glimpse at the various perspectives that candidates have on the issues, but the one-on-one debates featuring the Democratic and Republican candidates for president are effective at elucidating some of the major differences between the candidates. At times, these debates also make clear the similarities between the two presidential hopefuls. While both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are older men, both also share another feature: childlike qualities that make them unsuitable to be President of the United States.

That Donald Trump behaves like a child is known by all, even the most honest of his supporters would admit it. His observably meager vocabulary, his simplistic, black-and-white understanding of the issues, and his congenital revulsion to showing any semblance of grace all paint him as a toddler in septuagenarian packaging. With that said, oddly, his childlike insistence on getting the last word during the first presidential debate of the 2024 general election season actually served him very well, given that he often ignored moderators’ attempts to change the subject to ensure that he got the better of Biden during every exchange. It is one of the reasons why he clearly won the debate. However, winning a debate does not necessarily mean that a person will be an effective president. As politically motivated as Trump’s supporters claim that his recent conviction was, it is still a disgrace to have such a candidate running for the highest office in the land.

The main talking point of the post-debate coverage, however, has been Biden’s obvious mental decline and shocking inability to articulate himself in a way that would satisfy a reasonable observer that he is fully capable of caring for himself, much less being able to effectively be the leader of the free world. Frankly, Biden’s performance was horrific. He was incoherent, barely audible, and simply looked incredibly frail, especially next to Donald Trump who was aggressive and lucid—even if one disagreed with a lot of the arguments that he made on various topics. Biden’s inability to effectively rebut so many of the easily falsifiable points that Trump made was astonishing to witness. (I have contended that a lot of the Democratic concerns about real-time fact checking are just people being upset that Biden was so ineffective in his rebuttals.)

Biden’s debate showing was not just a bad performance; it was utterly disqualifying, as it made every honest observer understand that the United States has a mentally declining elderly man at the helm of the country. Democrats cannot reasonably continue to talk about how much they value the integrity of American democracy while shamelessly backing a man who openly demonstrated that he is incapable of doing the job of being president. Somebody is running the country, but it is definitely not the Joe Biden that appeared on stage during the first presidential debate of the 2024 general election. It is simply not tenable to argue that Biden’s obvious mental decline that he showed on stage, when he is supposed to be at his most buttoned-up and polished, gets better when he is off the stage and millions of people won’t be watching.

Encouraging people to vote for Biden in his current state of advanced mental decline is to make a mockery of the office of the presidency of the United States. Democrats correctly talk about how the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol Building was a dark day in American history and how it was a brazen attack on American democracy, but Joe Biden remaining president of the United States and seeking a second term with unambiguous signs of senility would also be the death of American democracy.

The counterargument that some will offer to this is that while Biden is president, he is not going to be making all of the decisions because it is the team he assembles that will be making the most important policy decisions. This does not work as an argument because nobody votes for the president on the basis of the person being an expert in military strategy, climate change, immigration, or taxation. They are voted in on the basis of their general approach to politics, and on whether they have the good judgment and reasoning faculties to have the final say on all of these varied issues that matter so much to the proper functioning of a country. This is why a responsible adult needs to be elected president, not a child.

That Trump is childish is common knowledge, but Biden’s growing childish attributes have not been considered much. Trump’s childishness appears to be congenital. Biden’s childishness has recently appeared. It is well known that when people experience age-related cognitive decline, they tend to become more infantile. This was evident from Biden, not only on the debate stage, but in subsequent rallies. For instance, Biden’s argument that he is fit to be president again, despite his obvious mental decline, because he knows how to tell the truth is the kind of argument that one would expect from a six-year-old. Children famously know how to tell the truth, but they are not qualified to be president of the United States because the job requires much more than that.

Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of Biden’s growing childishness in his advanced age occurred after the debate when his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, appeared on a stage with her husband to engage in what is known as “elderspeak.” Elderspeak is a term that is used to describe the ways that people condescendingly speak to those of an advanced age as if they are children who have difficulty understanding the complexities of language. As inappropriate as gerontologists claim that it is, elderspeak arises because there are some older people who actually do have difficulty understanding language as they decline with age, and they do need to be spoken to a lot more slowly and methodically. Jill Biden inadvertently announcing to the world that her husband is at that stage of decline further exposes how much a sham his candidacy is.

I have often wondered what makes older politicians, who should be enjoying the twilight of their lives away from the public eye with their children and grandchildren, cling so desperately to power, as if all of the value that they possess as humans lies in holding a political office until their dying breath (see my previous essay on ancient politicians and power intoxication). One thing that I did not consider is that the people who pursue power by all costs often have people around them who are not setting their priorities straight.

One cannot be sure what Jill Biden says to her husband backstage, but a supportive spouse should not be encouraging a declining partner onto the world stage to further embarrass himself just so they can maintain their current titles. Lying to Biden by telling him he did a great job is reminiscent of the kind of lie one tells a five-year-old who draws a grotesque picture with crayons. The only difference is that pretending to love the grotesque picture created by a child has no nuclear ramifications for the entire globe.

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are unfit to be President of the United States. The fact that they are the two candidates who emerged to represent the two major political parties in the United States, a country teeming with talent and ability, is evidence of why so many Americans feel utterly disenfranchised and are fed up with the American political process. America deserves the opportunity to vote for a fully functioning adult as president of the United States.