America’s presidential choice: Mentally unfit vs. morally unfit

Someone needs to tell Joe Biden that yelling for an hour during his recent State of the Union address doesn’t make him younger. Or mentally sharper. It only makes him louder.

Democrats said the speech was a “home run,” that it showed President Biden as a “fiery, powerful, vigorous guy.” They said his performance would put a dent in fears about his age and mental fitness for office.

But voters were not nearly as enthusiastic. A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed that the speech resulted in “zero improvement in perceptions of the president — or in his standing against former President Donald Trump.”

And for the record, the Joe Biden who Democrats were practically comparing to Winston Churchill is the very same Joe Biden that Special Prosecutor Robert Hur described as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hey, they said unflattering things about Churchill too.

I suspect that, in an effort to prove Hur wrong, we’ll get a lot more yelling between now and Nov. 5, as Biden tries to convince voters that while he may not be young, he’s not feeble either — no matter how many times Republicans try to portray him as too old to serve four more years in the Oval Office.

But with President Biden getting low approval numbers in every category from how he’s handling the crisis on our southern border to inflation to crime, you wouldn’t be far off base to think that Donald Trump is the odds-on favorite to win this year. And a batch of recent polls has him in the lead over Biden, including in key swing states that will have a big say in who wins in November.

But Donald Trump has one big obstacle blocking his way to the White House. And that obstacle is … Donald Trump. Between now and Election Day, it’s a safe bet he will do things and say things that not only put smiles on the faces of his MAGA base, but also put smiles on the faces of Joe Biden’s campaign team.

Take his recent speech in Rome, Georgia — his first campaign rally of the general election. In that speech, “Mr. Trump slurred his words and pretended to stutter in a mocking imitation of the president, who has dealt with a stutter since childhood,” the New York Times reported.

And then, as the Times continued, “Over nearly two hours, Mr. Trump lobbed sharp personal attacks at Mr. Biden’s mental and physical health and revived a litany of grievances against political opponents, prosecutors and television executives. He used inflammatory language to stoke fears about immigration, called the press ‘criminals’ and repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.”

None of this bothers Trump’s most loyal fans, who revel in his trash talk. But independent voters are another story. They’re more moderate and, after supporting candidate Trump in 2016, they abandoned him in 2020 after four years of virtually non-stop drama and chaos.

For Trump to win, he’ll need those swing voters — and running a campaign based on grievances and delusional stories about how he’s the victim of a stolen election isn’t the way to win them over.

In almost all presidential elections, the choice is between the incumbent and somebody new. Not this time around. It’s a contest between the president everybody knows and the former president everybody also knows.

So it almost certainly will come down to a contest in which voters will have to decide which candidate they like less. They see one as mentally unfit for office, as my friend John Daly has put it, and the other as morally unfit for office.

We’ll see if President Biden’s poll numbers improve as he reminds voters why they rejected Trump last time around. But Trump is still in the lead and might stay there if he can bring himself to do a few things during the remainder of the campaign: Try to remain relatively civil (tell me when you stop laughing); refrain from childish name-calling, like referring to the president as “crooked Joe” (see above about laughing); and failing that … to just shut up.

But asking Donald Trump to just shut up is like asking Joe Biden to behave as if he’s not “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

This is what we have to look forward to between now and Nov. 5. As my dear departed Jewish grandmother used to say when confronted with an unappealing choice: Oy vey!

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.