Driving the Bus of the American Presidency

Two dead ends and you still have to choose

Imagine for a moment that two men have applied for the position of school bus driver for the school your child attends. Imagine further that this bus will be full every day and will travel through a busy part of town.

One of the applicants is Joe Biden. The other is Donald Trump. Who would you hire? My guess is that most people would opt for “none of the above” if it were an option, but it’s not an option. At the end of the day, someone has to drive that bus.

Some readers say this comparison to the U.S. presidency is not well-taken, but let me ask you this. If you shudder at the idea of Joe Biden driving a bus full of children, is it any less scary that he has the codes to our nuclear arsenal? The same holds true for Donald Trump. If you can’t trust him to drive a school bus filled with children, why in the world would we want to trust him with the firepower of our military?

I read today that Joe Biden “misspoke” when he was referencing Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl. In the case of French President Mitterand, he died in 1996. Emmanuel Macron is the current president of France, not Mitterand. Helmut Kohl? He died in 2017. The chancellor of Germany who attended the G7 summit Biden referenced was Angela Merkel, not Kohl. Today neither of them is chancellor. Olaf Scholz is.

That alone is concerning, but when it is coupled with a scathing report from special prosecutor Robert Hur, who is investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Hur’s report spared Biden any accusations of wrongdoing, but it did paint the picture of Biden as forgetful and called into question his mental acuity.

The CNN story I read conveniently left out the fact that Hur is a Republican and has donated to a number of Republican candidates.

The takeaway from the special prosecutor’s report is that Joe Biden’s memory is faulty and failing, which is why he mishandled the classified documents. According to Hur, they found no criminal intent. He just fumbled and bumbled.

This stands in sharp contrast to the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents. In his case, no one is raising the issue of mental incompetence. Here the issue is criminal intent. What exactly was Trump planning to do with those classified documents and the information contained in them? Given that Trump sees everything through the lens of a business deal, we can only speculate what he had in mind. There was no fumbling and bumbling here.

We are left wondering which is worse, a president who is cognitively impaired due to age, or a president who is criminally-minded enough to use the presidency as a business opportunity.

Biden’s age is becoming a major focus in this election. He is currently 81 years old and will turn 82 on November 20th. If he wins in November, he will be 86 when he finishes his second term, assuming he finishes his second term.

Trump is not far behind. He is 77 years old right now and will turn 78 on June 14th. If he were to win, he would be 82 when he finishes his second term, and that is actually older than Biden is now. It does seem a little hypocritical for Trump supporters to lament or mock Biden’s age while supporting someone who will be even older by the time his term is up.

Trump has also had his mental acuity questioned recently when he mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. In a diatribe against Nikki Haley, everything he complained about pertained to Pelosi, not Haley. The only thing those two have in common is that they are both women. Trump got that much right I guess.

I want to return to the school bus for a moment. If Biden was hired to drive this bus, we might all be concerned about his ability to negotiate the traffic and follow the route. Would he forget where he is going? Would he forget what year it is, like he did with Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterand, and drop the wrong kids off at the wrong places? Would he forget that he is even driving a school bus?

If Trump was hired, we might be concerned if he is keeping his eye on the road or sending angry tweets on his cell phone about the latest indignity he has had to endure. If a kid was misbehaving on the bus, what kind of vengeance might he perpetrate against the kid? And could we trust him with our teenage daughters? He has, after all, bragged about walking into the dressing room at the Miss Teenage U.S.A. pageant because he owned it.

If these were the two choices for bus driver, I would either drive my own kid to school, or homeschool and be done with it.

I want to end this on a somewhat cautionary note. One of these two yahoos is going to win. The other is going to lose. The loser, having only served one term as president, is still eligible to run in 2028.

And so is Hillary Clinton.