The President Does Not Deserve Our Grace

We do not have to be gentle to the most powerful man in the world.

Justin Sullivan/ Getty

At this point, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a person who thinks, with utter certainty, that Joe Biden is still capable of performing the duties of President of the United States. Biden, at 81, has succumbed to the natural entropy of age: his speech has slowed, his thinking has clouded, his body has become frail. This process, a familiar one to anyone who has watched a person close to them age, has been publicly apparent for years, despite a relentless PR campaign that blamed the president’s vulnerabilities on his stutter or casual speaking style or temporary health concerns. It is difficult to watch time break down a human being in front of our eyes.

I say all that to make it clear that I understand the impulse to post things like this, a common line of commentary that is starting to appear in the Biden-Succession discourse:

Image via Twitter

The issue I have with this is that it asks us to separate Joe Biden the human being from Joe Biden the president. Joe Biden the human being deserves dignity. Joe Biden the president does not.

Right now, there is no separation between these two personas, because Joe Biden is still the president. There is a longer conversation to be had as to how much dignity people who have just formerly been the most powerful person in the world should receive, but the conversation about how much dignity sitting presidents should get is much shorter. The answer is none.

The president is unfit for the job. He cannot speak, think, campaign, or even walk in the way that he could just four years ago when these factors were already a concern. We are past sugarcoating or softening the blow on this. We should be furious that Joe Biden himself put us in this position. We should be furious because we elected him and now he is asking for our votes again.

This is one of the frustrating realities of representative — not direct — democracy. The basic tenet is this: politicians run for office to, at least philosophically, make themselves avatars of a certain section of the population (or the entire population, in the president’s case). We give them — singular, one person — the power to represent millions, trusting that they will be able to wield it effectively and responsibly. The modern presidency, of course, relies on an absurd ecosystem of advisors and underlings, but we do not (largely) elect those people.

I did not vote for Ron Klain in 2020. I do not care that Ron Klain still appears largely in control of his mental faculties, because he is not the president of the United States. If the Biden campaign is asking us, essentially, to vote for Joe Biden again on the strengths of what his unelected staff have been able to accomplish with him as a half-cogent figurehead, that is a perversion of the already sick notion of American democracy as it stands. What are we doing here?

He cannot do the job. He cannot be allowed to continue doing the job.

It is not amoral to say that the most powerful person in the world is senile, or becoming senile. It is not amoral, if said person refuses to leave office, to hammer home the fact that he is senile at every possible opportunity. The other option is admitting that there is no point in striving for an equitable system of government—no point in trying to build a better future where more people can live in freedom and exercise agency over our society’s communal goals.

If the old man stays in office, if he runs again, we’re throwing that out the window. We’re saying fuck the republic, all this is fake. There is no America, just a complicated system of PR and political logistics that allows a very small cabal of bureaucrats to fight over control of the world’s most deadly compilation of Excel spreadsheets.

And sure, maybe that is the truth. Maybe that is the country that we live in. But it doesn’t have to be, and if you’re a candidate running for national office in this country, you have to at least try to pretend that it isn’t. The Biden campaign isn’t even trying; on a conference call with campaign staff today, Biden himself reiterated that he is going to stay in the race. As a result, they’re going to hand off the Excel spreadsheets to one of the most openly violent and repressive administrations in our country’s history. You and me, we’re just numbers on that sheet. And like Biden’s poll numbers, there’s only one way we go from here: down, down, down.