In January, Donald Trump's legal team argued that a President ordering the assassination of political rivals would be legal and acceptable, there was silence from the media. In April, the former Attorney General of the United States said that Trump brought up thing like assasinating political rivals frequently while President, there was silence from the media. In 2015, Donald Trump acted like the third grade bully he is and mocked a reporter with a disability. There were no calls for him to drop out of the race. This year, Trump gave a ridiculous speech that is something you'd hear in the dementia ward of an aging facility, there was no coverage of Trump's old age and feeble mind. The speech generated a lone article in the New Yorker. And a video compilation even went viral on what's left of Twitter. But there were no New York Times editorials calling for Trump to drop out or endless coverage of Trump's mental state.
And so it goes on and on. There have been dozens of editorials framing it as a genuine national crisis that Joe Biden is old, like many old people sometimes stands around with his mouth open, and is (as he always has been, this is the same guy who battled Sarah Palin to a draw in 2008) prone to giving long, windy answers that are terrible in a debate.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court decided to accept, lock, stock, and barrel, Trump's notion that a President ordering the murder of his political opponents is completely legal and sheltered by the constitution. One would think, with one of the major party nominees threatening to do that, such a decision would define the election. Instead, it was a momentary blip on the radar distracting us from the bigger, most important issue: Joe Biden is old and has a competent Vice President who will vote for him in November.
Meanwhile, Trump's former Vice President, who has seen the insanity first hand, says he won't vote for him in November. There was no massive media scandal about an individual who spent four years a heartbeat away from the President saying he wouldn't vote for the person who hired him to the most important job other than President in any administration. It was brushed off and brushed aside, in favor of endless stories about Joe Biden being old.
What's behind the pathetic dereliction of duty by those in the press, who created the environment of endless stories about Joe Biden being three years older than Donald Trump? Greed. Slimy Trump merchants like Maggie Haberman and other "media stars" of the Trump universe have signed massive book deals for 2025. Those books will go straight to the remainder bin if Trump is defeated and no longer dominating our politics, as he has done for 10 years.
Joe Biden's great crime to these media morons isn't that he's old, it's that he's boring. A competent President doing things like improving public transit, lowering the cost of insulting and other prescription medication and canceling billions in student debt held by students of scammer for-profit colleges. And the list could fill a book, not that the media can pay attention long enough to write it.
I, and I think most Democratic voters, don't care that Biden is old. He may not survive his next term (the Presidency exacerbates aging). And that's OK (though something I hope doesn't happen because I like Joe Biden). But if it does happen, Kamala Harris will become President and carry out his agenda . For some reason, perhaps the fact that the Trump campaign started a lie about Harris being ineligible to serve as President in 2020, no one in the media understands what happens when a President cannot fulfill his term.
The constitution says that the Vice President immediately becomes President and the office of the Vice Presidency becomes vacant. The President appoints a new Vice President and the world goes on. It's happened before, in 1974 when Nixon resigned and Ford became President (and appointed Nelson Rockefeller Vice President; side note: Ford dumped Rockefeller from the ticket and nominated Bob Dole in 1976, the last major change at a convention, ask President Jimmy Carter how that worked out for Ford). And then many times before that, in an era when medicine wasn't as good as it is today (some of our best Presidents, including Harry Truman and Teddy Roosevelt, became President after the Presidency was vacated by the death of the incumbent).
And should Biden (or Trump) have a stroke and become mentally incapacitated, the 25th Amendment allows the cabinet to determine the President unfit to serve. If there wasn't such a massive double standard, then perhaps the media would be covering the fact that in the days after January 6, Trump's behavior was so unhinged that his cabinet seriously discussed invoking the 25th Amendment. Maybe they would decide that our democracy is so important that they should name the anonymous sources (almost assuredly cabinet members themselves) who called them and have a national debate about whether a person who proved himself to be that unfit while in office should be a candidate again.
Instead they saw ratings and book contracts. A return to the "glory days" of 2017. And they've ignored these massive issues to turn Joe Biden being old into the greatest scandal of all time.