Wishing the Wizard would grant us a mentally stable presidential candidate
Mar 4, 2024, 1:00 PM
Over the weekend, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley won Washington D.C.’s Republican primary — her first win in the race to secure the GOP presidential nomination. But it won’t matter — because Donald Trump won everywhere else this weekend: the Missouri and Idaho Republican caucuses — and he swept the Michigan GOP convention.
Now that the Supreme Court has put him back on Colorado’s ballot, he’ll likely win that primary too.
And Trump won everything before this weekend.
Speaking of this weekend, at a rally in Virginia, Trump mixed up current President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama, saying: “[Russian President] Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to… talk nuclear weapons today.”
Trump has confused the two before. It’s just one of the many mental gaffes he’s made from the podium. But like Haley’s win, that won’t matter either — because Biden is seen as the much older candidate — even though he’s not that much older than Trump.
I mean, before Biden, Trump was the oldest first-term president in U.S. history.
But because Biden seems to shuffle when he walks, appears to go out for ice cream every other day (something my grandpa was obsessed with) and because Trump seems so full of energy in comparison, “The Donald” gets the credit for being “The Younger One.”
In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 42% of all registered voters say that Donald Trump is too old to be president — but 73% says that Joe Biden is — including a majority of voters who supported Biden in 2020.
I was trying to figure out a spot in time in which Biden and/or Trump would choose to go back to in order to feel like they have a firm mental grasp. For some reason Doc Brown keeps popping in my head.
But going back to 1985 (when “Back To The Future” was released) — or even 1955 (where Marty McFly went in the time-traveling DeLorean) might not be far enough for these presidents to get back to a time when they didn’t forget, “why did I walk into this room?” Or, “where did I leave my keys?” (Especially bothersome when losing the keys to the nuclear arsenal.)
We may have to go back even further to find a time when these men’s brains were still super sharp. How about “The Wizard of Oz” and the part where the Scarecrow sings “If I Only Had a Brain?”
Okay. 1939 (when that film was released) — may be a little too far back, as neither Biden or Trump had even been born yet. I just thought it was apropos because Dorothy sings to the Scarecrow, “…with the thoughts that you’ll be thinkin’, you could be another Lincoln, if you only had a brain.”
The difference being between Biden and Trump is, Biden thinks he met Lincoln and Trump thinks (and has said out loud) that he is the greatest president since Lincoln.
Which confirms what I’ve said before: Voters this fall will feel like their choices are boiled down to: voting for a man with dementia; or, voting for a man with delusions.
Which gives me brain damage.
