The dullest assertion you can make about Donald Trump is that he’s a narcissist who has no interest in the American people and only cares about himself. Competent pundits don’t waste wordage on such an over-obvious observation.
Less obvious, though more so since last week’s dog’s dinner presidential debate – in the aftermath of which dubbing the encounter ‘elder abuse’ went from droll witticism to exhausted cliché in a few hours – is that Joe Biden’s narcissism rivals Trump’s and may even exceed it.
The Bidens’ decision to contest this race was arrogant and criminally oblivious to the country’s future
Early in his 2020 run, Biden indicated to apparatchiks in private that if he was victorious in the forthcoming election, he would assume the presidency (at the ripe old age that Trump is now) as a caretaking one-termer, who would restore sanity to the Oval Office and then hand the baton to the next generation. True, he avoided making the promise publicly explicit, lest he be diminished as a lame duck. But in December 2019, Politico quoted a ‘prominent adviser to the campaign’ as making another, or so you would think, over-obvious observation: ‘If Biden is elected, he’s going to be 82 years old in four years, and he won’t be running for re-election.’
So what happened? The stock line is that the President felt called to sacrifice another precious four years of his life to rescue his beloved country, because he’s the only Democrat in the nation who can defeat Trump and therefore save ‘democracy’ (otherwise........