It’s called deflecting . . . and Donald Trump is an expert, with many decades of experience under his belt.

He used it against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris, inventing dirt when he couldn’t find any, and magnifying whatever bits and pieces he did find. But those were active political opponents, and everyone knows that politics is a dirty game.

But what purpose does it serve for Trump, now firmly ensconced in the Oval Office once again, to lodge scurrilous charges against former President Joe Biden . . . a man who is now out of the political arena, and who — in what should be his golden years — is fighting a devastating health issue?

In an act of sheer meanness, Trump has ordered an investigation into Biden and his former White House aides, alleging a “conspiracy [to] deceive the public about Biden’s mental state.” [Kelly Ng, BBC News, June 4, 2025.]

His argument is that Biden’s aides’ use of an autopen — a signature device used for decades by other presidents, including Trump himself — was actually a ruse to “conceal Biden’s cognitive decline.” [Id.]

Toward the end of Biden’s presidency, it had become evident that he was slowing down. He was a man in his 80s, who walked a little more slowly, and occasionally stumbled. I do that. He sometimes took a few seconds to find just the right words to make a point. I do that, too. It’s a natural feature of physical aging, and it doesn’t necessarily indicate senility.

Franklin Roosevelt ran the country from a wheelchair. And before him, when Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke while in office, his wife Edith — an unelected non-official — became the country’s “secret president,” managing the Executive Office and deciding which matters to bring to her husband’s attention.

Corporate executives, professors, physicians, and other professionals have aides and assistants to ease the burden of the multitude of routine matters that arise on a daily basis. So do presidents . . . because there simply are not enough hours in the day for one person in a position of authority to handle them all. If Donald Trump had to attend to every minuscule detail himself, when would he ever find time to wage all of his personal battles against people like Biden, Obama, and now Elon Musk?

So why is he doing this, and why now? Is it merely to distract the public from some other issue? Does he consider Biden a continuing threat because of his potential influence over a segment of the voting public? Or — most likely — is he looking for an excuse to invalidate more of Biden’s earlier programs and executive actions?

Whatever his reasons, demeaning an 82-year-old man who has already faced challenges Trump cannot even imagine — the loss of his first wife and young child in a tragic accident, loss of an adult son to cancer, and now himself battling an aggressive form of cancer — is personally and professionally abhorrent. But it is typical of the sort of reprehensible behavior we have come to expect — and, worse, to accept — from a man who has spent a lifetime serving only himself and blithely destroying anyone who gets in his way.

Joe Biden was not a perfect president, because there is no such thing as a perfect person. But he is a man who has served his country to the best of his ability for many decades, and who does not deserve to be hounded by a mean-spirited, vengeful individual who has never had an altruistic thought or given of himself to anyone.

It simply isn’t right.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/6/25