Trump's gold sneakers, Biden's age and the media's love of a simple story line
Another insane news cycle, and some reaction to my recent post about Biden's memory
First off, a warm welcome to a whole bunch of new subscribers here. I’m glad to have you aboard. I also appreciated your many comments on my post last week about the regrettable way the news media — led by the New York Times — has been overemphasizing concerns about President Biden’s age and memory.
Of course, not everyone agreed that making this a focal point of the presidential campaign is a form of journalistic malpractice.
Jack Shafer of Politico used my piece as a way to argue for the opposite. We need MORE coverage of Biden’s mental acuity, according to this longtime press critic, who wrote in fulsome praise: “The Times has gone at a real story the way a great newspaper should.”
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate saw it as I did, and I appreciated her nod to my column in her recent piece, “The Real Way to Think about Biden’s Age This Run.” She summarized the situation: “So now Americans face the problem that Biden is old, while Trump is an authoritarian who wants to ‘create a private red-state army under the president’s command.’”
Lithwick suggested considering why the supposedly doddering Biden “has managed to helm the most successful presidency in modern history. Booming economy, eye-popping jobs reports, the first gun violence reduction bill in decades, $19 trillion American rescue plan plus Covid relief, Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure prioritized, judges seated.” How could such a forgetful fellow get all this done? She answers: “He has, for the most part, surrounded himself with experts, genuine scientists, respected economists and effective governmental actors and advisors.”
If you’d like to hear more from Lithwick, check out my interview with her on the “American Crisis” podcast here. It was one of my favorite conversations in that 10-week series.
One other aftermath of the Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents was a blistering four-page letter to the White House press corps issued by Ian Sams, White House spokesman for oversight and investigations. Sams argued that nearly everyone in the news media got it wrong with headlines like this typical one from CNN: “Special Counsel report concludes Biden willfully retained classified material.”
Sams insists that if that had been the case, Hur would have recommended criminal charges against Biden, which he did not. The problem is that the executive summary of the 400-page report includes this sentence on its very first page: “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
And though there are all sort of complications and contradictions in the report itself, that definite-sounding sentence was all a lot of journalists seemed to see.
If the special prosecutor had written “some evidence,” that would have helped, but I don’t think he was bending over backwards to be fair. You can read Sams’ letter to the press corps here, and the executive summary of the report here.
But the news cycle moved on. The big development was that the judge overseeing Trump’s civil fraud case ordered that the former president pay New York State about $450 million (including interest) and severely restricted him from doing business in the state for years.
It’s a crippling ruling, but the bad news for Trump could start to get worse next month when his various criminal trials begin (Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s poor judgment is a column for another day).
Seemingly undaunted, Trump responded not only by trashing the judge and prosecutor but — as one does — unveiling some $399 Trump-branded gold sneakers at a gathering called Sneaker Con.
Now that’s a nice simple story, easily expressed in a headline like this one from NBC News: “Trump launches a sneaker line.” Or this one from Axios: “Trump’s high-top sneakers sell out hours after launch.”
You can’t blame the media for everything, of course, and I’m grateful for the good reporting I do see, including plenty in the New York Times. But overall, American citizens are not well-informed or thoughtful about national politics. Consider this Times study in which 13 undecided independent voters answered questions in a focus group; as a group, they clearly favored Trump.
Biden? They trashed him: “Senile” and “unfit” and “disingenuous.”
Trump? Well, he’s a narcissist, one allowed. But, “I just think he had our economy pushing in the right direction,” said one respondent. He added, “I’ve hated this man since I was about 17. But I voted for him three times.”
Biden doesn’t seem to get credit for the strong economy. Does the media bear some responsibility for that? I think so.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter where I post as sulliview. And thanks for reading and caring about these issues.
It’s a long time till November. It’s going to seem even longer.
I personally will never recover from the national shame and disgrace of having a presidential candidate who does infomercials.
As for Biden's age...the "issue" shows how Americans and media alike are guilty of the most deplorable and counterproductive ageism. Read any story on the subject, replace Biden's age with his skin color, gender, or religion, and you'll see that the one bias Americans approve of is discrimination based on age. That's shown by the fact - FACT - that Biden is doing his job extremely well right now (as this column rightly says), yet Democrats and Republicans, media and voters alike are dismissive and blind to his accomplishments.
A reality-based nation would be grateful to have a wise, experienced, competent, caring elder leading it. Its citizens would count themselves lucky for every single day they had the benefit of his hard-won skills and judgment. But here in America, people look down on you once you've passed the age of 65. That's not only morally indefensible, it's self-defeating. For one thing, the day will come when you yourself are considered mere fodder for the abbatoir. For another, what an elder may lose in physical strength is abundantly offset by the mental, emotional, and spiritual resources that person gains over time.
Not everyone becomes a better person as they age (presenting Exhibit A: Donald Trump). But if you do life right, you have so much to offer in your older years that elders are, as a whole, a vast source of power that America is just plain too stupid to tap.
One respondent hated agent orange since he was 17 but voted for him 3 times? Good grief. That reminds me of church meetings where we tried to pass fair budgets and someone would invariably vote no without stating a reason therefor or try to be cooperative.
$300 gold sneakers. How about: His failed university. His failed airline. His many failed business enterprises. Please recall his statement in 2016 about creating an empire of $8 billion (of dubious accuracy). Had he invested the $200 million gift from his father he could have $12 billion. Yet he claims to be “like really smart."
Biden just keeps marching on as an honorable and decent man. He remains President, at this phase of his life, to preserve our country as a democracy, not to just turn it over to an ass who has been found guilty by a civll jury of rape (and there are 54 other women who would back up that verdict for E. Jean Carroll) - not to mention the Bankruptcies, many serious indictments against him, and the many contractors he stiffed when building enterprises that failed.
Thank you Margaret for taking a stand on this important issue.