Famously, ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a Chinese curse. Americans have got to know this all too well as of late.
Within a month, we Yanks have seen a sitting president reveal his senility during a nationally televised CNN debate. Less than a fortnight later, we saw his opponent survive an assassination attempt. Then, a bandaged-up Donald Trump hosted the Republican National Convention (RNC), alongside rock star Kid Rock, UFC boss Dana White and SlutWalk founder Amber Rose. Now, Joe Biden has departed from the presidential race.
In many ways, this latest development is actually the craziest of them all. Especially considering that, for years now, America’s largest press outlets have been reassuring a nervous citizenry that our octogenarian president is alright, if not better.
Prominent television host Joe Scarborough recently declared on his Morning Joe MSNBC show that this version of Biden is ‘the best Biden ever’. A year before that, he described Biden as ‘very sharp’. Just a few years back in 2020, the PolitiFact website ran a formal fact-check of Fox News anchor Brit Hume’s claim that Biden was ‘senile’. Fact-checkers went so far as to interview a doctor of geriatric medicine before flatly calling Hume’s assertion ‘false’.
This bovine pattern of herd behaviour took place despite the plain fact that Biden often seemed to barely be functional. There has been no end of widely circulated compilation videos of all the president’s ‘gaffes’ and ‘missteps’. These include Biden wandering off stage, falling up multiple flights of stairs, proudly declaring that he has cancer and claiming that a close relative of his was eaten by cannibals.
Biden’s handlers, such as press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, have attempted to downplay and dismiss these clips as ‘cheap-fakes’. But they were clearly not. The reality of Biden’s deterioration was revealed to all during his televised meltdown on the debate stage last month. It was a performance that even the left-leaning CNN summed up as ‘disastrous’.
When it comes to media coverage of former president Donald Trump, we see almost the exact reverse of the narrative surrounding Biden. Trump has spent almost a decade being accused of a range of things that are – obnoxious though he is – insane.
Of course, the 20-year-old Crooks was clearly crazy – aspiring assassins are almost always lunatics with heads full of rabid ferrets. There is little point in analysing their ‘manifestos’ and similar gibberings in search of insights into the ills of our modern day. Besides, it now seems that Crooks may have been on the fence about whether to target Biden or Trump – or another political figure, such as centre-left attorney general Merrick Garland. Presumably, though, the constant media smear campaign against Trump didn’t help matters.
A trend that has been unavoidably obvious over the past few weeks is that huge chunks of the American population are beginning to react to this constant elite dishonesty with rage. It is unsurprising, then, that Trump is largely ahead in the polls.
The Trump train has certainly picked up a disparate cast of characters. The RNC last week featured Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien, feminist OnlyFans star Amber Rose, rap-rocker Kid Rock, an African-American preacher from inner-city Detroit and a shirt-tearing Hulk Hogan. While some of these people have long displayed conservative political leanings, most, unsurprisingly, have not. And there are a lot more dissatisfied and ‘politically homeless’ Americans where those came from.
It’s been a wild month in US politics. As Trump took the convention stage – ear freshly grazed by an assassin’s bullet, speaking after a pro-wrestler and a white rapper – you have to wonder if this is actually real life. Fortunately or unfortunately, the times we live in could still get even crazier… President Kamala Harris, anyone?
Wilfred Reilly is a spiked columnist.
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