The duel of the dotards: Are either Biden or Trump even capable of lying?
Timothy P. Carney
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Did Joe Biden flat-out lie about Sept. 11 in order to exalt himself?
“Never forget,” President Joe Biden said over the weekend. “Ground zero, New York. I remember standing there the next day, and looking at the building. I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell.”
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This is false, of course. CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale, who wrote about the previous president, “Trump was willing to lie about everything, all the time, often for no obvious reason,” had this to say about Biden’s made-up 9/11 detail: “It’s possible, of course, that Biden genuinely misremembered when his visit to Ground Zero occurred.”
That’s very possible, of course, both because Joe Biden tells false autobiographical stories, and because Joe Biden is 80 years old.
Fact-checker Dale capably runs through Biden’s many false “memories” and notably does not use the word “lie” a single time. This, too, reflects the fact that Biden’s memory might be faltering.
It reminds me of an apt observation years ago by liberal writer David Roberts.
“The question of what Donald Trump ‘really believes’ has no answer,” Roberts wrote.
“When he utters words, his primary intent is not to say something, to describe a set of facts in the world; his primary intent is to do something, i.e., to position himself in a social hierarchy.”
I think this is true. Other writers made a similar point. Mona Charen wrote in 2022, “Asking whether Trump knew the election was free and fair is like asking whether a komodo dragon prefers smooth jazz or hip hop. It’s a category error.”
Trump’s brain, even before he was in his late 70s, was too incontinent to hold on to a true belief. This is, in fact, his best defense against the charge that he lied to overturn the 2020 election — that he didn’t really believe he had lost, in part because his brain doesn’t really hold beliefs.
So now imagine the 2024 presidential campaign: A declining 81-year-old whose memory is so bad you can’t accuse him of lying against an addled 78-year-old whose lack of belief in anything but himself means you can’t accuse him of lying.
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That’s not healthy for democracy. We’re supposed to hold our leaders to account. You can no more hold Trump or Biden to account for their falsehoods than you could hold a 3-year-old to account for claiming he wrestled a polar bear.
It’s imperative that both parties nominate someone else.