WHENEVER YOU WANT ‘THE AWFUL TRUTH’, ASK MIKE

President Joe Biden...to be or not to be

 Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore succinctly said this week what I’ve been trying to tell people, ever since President Biden short-circuited during the first—and very likely last—presidential debate with former president (and convicted felon) Donald Trump. Namely, that President Biden’s wife and his inner-circle of aides are not doing him (or democracy) any favors by pushing him to run again when he is very apparently no longer in any shape to do so.

Okay, let me preface any further remarks with this: As long as the Republicans’ opposition candidate to the incumbent president remains Donald J. Trump—court-confirmed sexual predator, thirty-four-count felon, and the man who sought to overthrow the government and remain in power as an ad hoc ruler—the only option open to anyone who gives a damn about the future of American democracy will be the man or woman running against him. The salient point of this upcoming election isn’t a choice between candidates. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarian rule. (I defy you to read Project 2025—aka Agenda 47—and tell me I’m wrong).

The truth is, if President Joe Biden remains the candidate for 2024, he is all we’ve got. Perhaps he’ll surprise us all by proving to be an even better leader in his second term than in his first, since he’ll no longer be distracted by the perpetual campaign cycle which is, unfortunately, part and parcel of the contemporary political scene. But even if he isn’t, let me make this clear as my unwavering stance: Joe Biden spark-shower short-circuited is a better president than a seditious and felonious Donald Trump and his band of neo-fascists. In fact, Joe Biden in a coma is better than the unspeakable alternative. 

For any true patriot, any person who cares about preserving the two-and-a-half-century democratic traditions of the United States of America, Donald Trump is simply not a viable alternative. On the contrary, he is a clear and present danger to American democracy. If you don’t believe me, read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or watch the excellent TV series of the same name, and then read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Atwood couldn’t have written Agenda 47 better (or worse, as it were). In fact, it’s almost as if the Heritage Foundation had used Atwood’s novel as a blueprint for the kind of dystopian, post-democratic world they wish to create.

That said, however, Mike Moore, typically, with much less diplomacy than I or anyone else has applied, is telling it like it is. In an interview on MSNBC, Moore said, “The problem here is that I think there’s a form of elder abuse going on here, where the Democratic Party and the people that are part of the apparatus are pushing and pushing and pushing him (Biden) to stay.”  Moore, who himself is seventy, expanded on the image of “elder abuse”, saying that “watching the debate…was heartbreaking.” He went on to say, “Imagine that was your father up there…Why isn’t anybody doing anything? Why did they do it? Why did they even let him go out on the stage in this condition? Who was looking out for him? Who’s looking out for him right now?”

These are all questions I’ve been asking myself as well. There are many, myself included, who are being perceived as attacking the president over his disastrous debate performance, when what we are instead asking is if the president was in the shape he was in, why on earth did his campaign team, his closest aides, and indeed the first lady, not say he was too ill to go on, and simply cancel or postpone the event? Putting the party’s campaign ahead of the president’s health and welfare is precisely how we got into this mess in the first place, and it has been a disservice to both the president and to the Democratic presidential campaign. So it is the campaign and the party that are to blame. Not the president, who, through no fault of his own, was in no condition to totter out onto that stage.

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore

And instead of fessing up and doing damage control, his aides continue to double down. Or, failing that, to shut down the dialogue, telling everyone that the debate’s over, it was no big deal, nothing to see here, now move the hell on. But it was a big deal. The dialogue is going to go on whether they like it or not. Not because the press is talking about it, but because the voters and the international community are. And that’s scaring the bejesus out of a lot of the down-ballot candidates and world leaders alike. The down-ballot Democrats because their political survival may depend on it. World leaders because, if Trump should win again, their literal survival will be at risk.

The NATO allies view with horror a second Trump presidency. It nearly sank NATO the first time around, and now after three and a half years of working with Biden to rebuild that seventy-five-year-old alliance that Trump so undermined, they hear the former president saying that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin should do “whatever the hell he wants to” in Ukraine. European leaders don’t believe Putin will stop with Ukraine. So hearing that, they can only see Trump 2.0 as not only a threat to American democracy, but to a free and democratic Europe as well.

In that sense, President Biden made a miraculous comeback from the debate episode when he this past week hosted the annual NATO conference, this time in Washington. By all accounts, the president was on his game, greeting world leaders, holding talks on Ukraine, and handling other weighty topics with knowledge and aplomb. This was President Biden in his element, since there has probably been no other president in living memory with such an intimate working knowledge of international affairs. But even at his current best, there was a glaring disconnect when he spoke of the courage of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in resisting Russian invasion, and then introduced him to the conference as “President Putin”.

I watched the president’s post-NATO summit press conference last evening. As I did, I think I probably felt like many other viewers who have long admired President Biden, based on his half-century in government and lawmaking, and think of him as the leader who stopped Donald Trump and saved American democracy from dissolution. That is to say, I found myself agitated and sitting on the edge of my seat, hoping with all my heart that he would be able to show the country and the world that the issues that affected him at the debate were merely the product of overwork and exhaustion, not of any permanent cognitive failing.

The other feeling that I had was one of growing irritation that the president was having to field question after question regarding his fitness to continue serving for another four years, when the man he is running against is a morally bankrupt, grossly perverse, criminally unfit insurrectionist with a now well-documented authoritarian agenda for the future of the United States. I was thinking that President Biden was doing well, sounding strong and confident, despite knowing that his debate performance has placed him under a magnifying glass.

The president worked so hard to allay all of the concerns that have swirled about him since the debate, and did such a good job at it, that there was a moment when I asked myself if we hadn’t all just panicked and made a mountain out of a molehill. But then it happened. In answer to a query about whether he was confident in Vice President Harris’s ability to lead the country if, for some reason, he couldn’t. "Look,” the president responded, “I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if she was not qualified to be president.”

As a veteran newsman, I knew that the press would jump on such a short circuit with both feet. It was what everyone was waiting for as they listened, reconfirmation of their growing suspicions that Biden’s mind was indeed addled. I wasn’t wrong. The gaffe has been in headlines all day today.  But they weren’t wrong either. The error went right by the president. He never caught himself, never self-corrected. To their credit, the reporters who asked the President about his mental health afterwards, never mentioned the fact that, right there, while he was defending his fitness to serve, he had called his own vice president by his bitter rival’s surname.

Perhaps this gaffe wouldn’t have been quite as noticeable if it hadn’t followed another crossed-wire incident earlier in the week. I’m referring to when, in an interview with Philadelphia-based WURD Radio anchor Andrea Lawful-Sanders the president said, “By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president.” Obviously, he meant that he had been the VP of the first black president and that he was the first president to appoint a black woman as his running mate and vice president. But it came out as a brain salad.

Leaving that aspect aside for a moment, however, those of us who are capable of looking at this from a human as well as political viewpoint are heartbroken to see how a man with an admirable and uncommon half-century political career, who preceded his own term in the Oval Office with an eight-year stint as vice president to one of the most popular leaders in US history, is being politically manhandled, humiliated and raked over the coals, essentially, for being unwell, instead of being placed under the care of the elite teams of physicians that, as president, he has at his disposal.

Unfortunately, these meltdowns didn’t take place in the privacy of President Biden’s own home in Wilmington, Delaware. They happened in the homes of many millions of Americans. And no one with any experience in these matters believes that his shocking debate performance was a one-off, or “a bad night”, as the campaign is spinning it. Rather, to anyone who has known someone who has suffered through such old-age problems is bound to feel that it is likely only one in a series of frightening moments.

Bernie Sanders

As Mike Moore said in the interview with MSNBC, “Something was wrong that night. We all saw it. We can’t unsee it. And as Richard Pryor and before that, Chico Marx said, ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?' My eyes weren’t lying, and yours weren’t either.”

Like Moore, I don’t believe age alone is a disqualifying factor. There are people whose mental acuity and physical resilience continue to be more than acceptable at the president’s age. For instance, anyone seeing and hearing Vermont’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders—Biden’s most successful liberal contender for the presidency and later staunch supporter—would still have trouble making a case that he is too old to remain in politics, despite the fact that he is eighty-two. But by the time one reaches, as I myself have, one’s mid to late seventies, continuing to function like a well-oil machine becomes less and less of a certainty. It becomes the thing you fear.

Still, there are incredible cases, like that of renowned linguist, philosopher, sociologist and democratic activist Noam Chomsky who, at least until a very recent stroke, continued to have one of the most brilliant minds in America, even into his nineties. I’m thinking too of renowned newsman Robert Cox, the man who was my mentor when I started out in journalism fifty years ago this year, and who, at a lucid ninety, continues to travel internationally and to accept public speaking engagements and TV interviews in his second language. But these tend to be admirable and enviable exceptions to the rule.

As usual, Michael Moore has jabbed his finger into a gaping open sore that many others are trying hard to ignore. That’s what he does. He tells “the awful truth”—which was the name of his riveting and sometimes hilarious investigative TV show on the Bravo Network, prior to the fame he has accrued as a brilliant documentary film-maker. The truths that most people would rather not hear, he tells and demonstrates in such a way that, like a train wreck you can’t turn away from despite your best efforts, he forces you to face “the awful truth”. 

While some people close to President Biden, including First Lady Jill Biden, might see as traitors the—up to now—seventeen Democrat members of Congress who have openly asked the president to step down, or other highly influential Democrats like former President Barack Obama or retired House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who are reportedly discussing the issue in private. But they are not. Most of them have both the well-being of the president and the well-being of the nation in mind.

In the end, the most patriotic mission that the president has right now is to ensure that Donald Trump never again sets foot in the White House. And if that means stepping down and handing over the mantel to a more viable candidate, then that is clearly what he needs to do.