Ask A Genius 951: President Biden Versus Former President Trump
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/17
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: President Biden and former President Trump are the oldest candidates in American history. Before them, they set the record. So, it’s very unusual to observe American politics from a distance. What are some of your thoughts on the context?
Rick Rosner: They have the first presidential debate of this cycle in 10 days. Each side is optimistic that it will make their candidate look good, while the other candidate looks terrible. Trump can endlessly spout nonsense. He can talk for 90 minutes and two hours when he holds a rally. A lot of it is on a teleprompter. He complains about it when the teleprompter runs out or malfunctions, but he keeps going. He says a lot of crazy nonsense, but his supporters don’t mind. Most of the country either isn’t affected by what he says or doesn’t see it because the election is still almost five months away, and most people aren’t paying attention to the endless political rhetoric. Some people will vote without paying attention, and some won’t start paying attention until three or four weeks before the election. Trump spouts nonsense and makes mistakes, either lying or being mistaken. For example, a couple of days ago, he talked about how Biden has dementia, but his physician, Ronnie Johnson, tested him and found him to be mentally fit. The problem is, his doctor isn’t named Ronnie Johnson; it’s Ronnie Jackson. Even there, he’s making mistakes, but nobody cares because his base doesn’t care. You can look on Twitter and see people making fun of this, but those people weren’t going to vote for him in the first place.
The people who might be persuaded by this aren’t on Twitter anymore because Twitter has changed. Biden, on the other hand, has an older appearance and walks gingerly, as does Trump. Both are very careful on the stairs when leaving an airplane. However, if you listen to Biden, he makes sense. He is in command of the facts. Sometimes, he pauses or hesitates because he has a stutter. He has verbal tics that annoy me, like saying, “I’m not kidding” or “I’m serious, folks,” too often. I wish someone would work with him on that. I don’t know if it’s the equivalent of saying “you know” or “um,” but it’s annoying. I don’t know if that makes people think he’s losing it. It shouldn’t. It doesn’t do to a great extent. What makes people think he’s losing is the unfairly edited clips of Biden.
One of the most recent ones was when he squatted down for a second, and everyone who posts on Twitter and Fox News said, “Oh, look, he just soiled his pants. He’s like a toddler.” Have you ever watched a toddler soil their diaper? They get still and then hunker down to relieve themselves. They do it standing up. They said that’s what Biden was doing. It was stupid and based on a falsely edited clip. They took him to sit down and left out the part where there was a chair he was sitting on. Then they reversed the clip, so he appeared to stand up again in reverse motion. It’s just manipulating the video. More recently, two days ago, he was at a Democratic fundraiser in LA with Obama. He was leaving the stage after a discussion, and there’s a clip where he pauses for a second. The Republicans are saying, “Look, he had a freeze, his brain shut down, and you know, his brain’s not working, he had a glitch.” It’s just dumb. He stops for a second to either listen to the applause or somebody’s yelling something at him from the audience. After a second, Obama grabs his hand and says, “Let’s go, buddy.” The Republicans are saying, “Look, he was lost, and Obama had to lead him off stage.” Obama said, “Come on, let’s go.” It wasn’t that Biden’s brain was shut down. There were two different interpretations: one reasonable and one nonsense.
I am still determining what will happen in 10 days at the debate. I assume that Trump will be bombastic. One cause for optimism among people who don’t like Trump is that his people are saying he’s not preparing for the debate. There’s a good chance they’re lying because they lie about everything. But there’s also a chance it’s accurate because Trump dislikes working hard on anything. We know how it will go. It may not change anyone’s mind. Trump will get in there and say, “This guy has dementia, and he’s responsible for inflation.” Whatever the question is, Trump will ignore it and say mean things, a lot of them untrue, about Biden. The moderators will try to rein him in, but they will have limited success. Biden will try to state facts and probably try to attack Trump a little bit by saying, “Are you going to vote for a convicted felon, guilty of 34 charges and an adjudicated rapist?” Will that work on anybody? I don’t know. We hope that Trump will look bad, but Trump has looked bad in every debate. The ones against Hillary in 2016, against Biden in 2020 — most people thought Biden won those debates, but it doesn’t matter to Trump’s base.
So far, Biden has more money to spend on advertising than Trump. He has yet to deploy much of it because this is the earliest in recent history that we’ve known who the two major nominees will be. Usually, it happens closer to the election. We’ve known each other for a few months, starting seven months before the election. Usually, it’s about four months before the election, at the national convention or leading up to it. This has been unusual because you have two candidates with super high negatives who have been in place as the nominees for months sooner than would usually happen.
So They’re roughly tied in the polls. There’s reason to distrust the polls. There’s reason to be somewhat optimistic that when people start to pay attention, Trump is such a prominent, incompetent piece of crap that people will be disgusted by him. But who knows?
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