Vanity Fair: Trump's go-to insult against Biden backfires

Article by Caleb Ecarma

In the past four years, Donald Trump has consistently depicted Joe Biden as an inept senior citizen. This has proven to be a highly successful line of attack, considering the majority of Americans feel that 80-year-old Biden is too aged for another election cycle. However, Trump himself has been making a number of slip-ups lately that are strikingly similar to those he mocks in Biden. As a 77-year-old frontrunner for the Republican presidential candidate position, Trump is likewise vulnerable to such criticism.

For example, Trump has recently been prone to confusing political figures such as the leaders of Hungary and Turkey and the Bush brothers. He even incorrectly identified Barack Obama as his opponent in the 2016 election. Furthermore, he has had issues reading from a teleprompter, despite repeatedly mocking Biden for the same problem.

During a speech in Sioux City, Iowa, Trump wrongly identified the location as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A Republican state lawmaker, Bradley Zaun, needed to remind Trump of his actual location onstage. The attempt to correct the mistake only served to emphasize Trump's error. His flub is highlighted considering he deliberately confused Iowa with Idaho while imitating the president earlier this month. Biden previously made a similar gaffe by referring to New Hampshire as Nevada in 2020.

The Biden campaign is taking advantage of these events by pointing out occasions where Trump has appeared disjointed and perplexed. On X, previously known as Twitter, it shared videos of Trump’s blunders along with clips of the ex-president struggling with words like “terrorism” and “Hamas” during another weekend address.

Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and Trump’s leading competitor in the GOP primaries, adopted a like strategy in his campaign last week. He initiated an “accident tracker” counting the days since Trump’s last error. DeSantis also recently purposed that Trump is not the same person who ran and won in 2016: “In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” he noted sadly to New Hampshire reporters. “Now it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”

Mindful of the potentiality of Biden's age critiques pivoting to him, Trump in a recent interview dismissed the idea that Biden was “too old” to run for reelection, labeling him instead as “grossly incompetent.” 

However, this viewpoint does not reconcile with public opinion. A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in August revealed that 77% of Americans believe Biden is too old to govern for another term. With 89% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats agreeing Biden is too old, Trump is less exposed to this line of question, yet about half of the survey participants still regarded him as being too aged to lead the country.