It is worth remembering, as the presidential race hits the homestretch, that the same party that says Vice President Kamala Harris is a competent, moderate, joyful alternative that Americans of all stripes can be confident will govern in their best interests is also the same party that said, just two months ago, that President Joe Biden had another four years of governance left in him.
I mention this only because we got one of our rare glimpses of our diminished nominal leader on Wednesday, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the White House yet again had to spring into damage control mode — like it has so many times over the past four years.
Biden, as the BBC noted, was “visiting firefighters in Pennsylvania near where one of the four hijacked planes crashed.” First responders being who they are — especially in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 went down after passengers wrested control of the hijacked Boeing 757 from al Qaeda terrorists — one of them was unsurprisingly wearing a Trump 2024 hat.
What was surprising, instead, was who ended up wearing it:
Joe Biden is wearing a Trump hat right now.. This is real. pic.twitter.com/JDqKMNtFcx
— aka (@akafacehots) September 11, 2024
And yes, apparently Biden knew what he was doing. Kinda. Maybe.
Video of the event showed the president and the first responder joking about Biden’s age and whether he could remember his name. The president gave the man, who was wearing the Trump hat, an autographed hat with the presidential seal on it.
Does Biden wish he was still running for president?
Yes: 100% (1 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Then he told the man, “I need that hat,” gesturing to the man’s Trump hat.
The audience urged Biden to put it on.
“I ain’t going that far!” he said — before, of course, going that far, and then going viral:
Higher res footage of Biden putting on a Trump 2024 hat today via kelseysimmers94 (TikTok) pic.twitter.com/FeiVsdbdG1
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 12, 2024
Andrew Bates — the White House deputy press secretary and longtime Democratic operative whose unfortunate duty over the past few years has been to convince the country it’s really just raining on them when Joe Biden’s senility pees on our collective leg — insisted on social media that it was merely a gesture of unity, one made by someone totally in compos mentis.
“At the Shanksville Fire Station, @POTUS spoke about the country’s bipartisan unity after 9/11 and said we needed to get back to that,” he wrote on social media.
“As a gesture, he gave a hat to a Trump supporter who then said that in the same spirit, POTUS should put on his Trump cap. He briefly wore it.”
At the Shanksville Fire Station, @POTUS spoke about the country’s bipartisan unity after 9/11 and said we needed to get back to that.
As a gesture, he gave a hat to a Trump supporter who then said that in the same spirit, POTUS should put on his Trump cap. He briefly wore it. https://t.co/7VKZnkVMY7
— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) September 11, 2024
Right. Just to reiterate, this was Capt. Unity after the June 27 debate, which began the unraveling of his campaign:
I don’t know what you did last night, but I spent 90 minutes debating a guy with the morals of an alley cat.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 28, 2024
Furthermore, several days before that debate, these were the kind of posts that were coming from his account:
Democracy and freedom are on the ballot this November.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 22, 2024
That kind of talk abated after an attempted assassin took a shot at former President Trump during a rally in mid-July, but saying that “democracy and freedom are on the ballot” is a semi-polite way of saying your opponent is a dictator. One, apparently, with the “morals of an alley cat.”
But let’s put on his campaign hat to show unity? Sure, why not?
If this doesn’t put to rest the notion that Joe Biden has any consistent idea what is going on at the presidential level at any given moment, I don’t know what will.
Yes, granted, he’s not on the ballot this November, but his vice president is and, just a day before, she tried to convince the country during a debate that a Trump presidency represents a grave existential threat to America as we know it.
To hear her say it, this wasn’t Clinton v. Bush or Obama v. McCain, this was something like an election between French resistance leader Charles de Gaulle and Vichy collaborationist Philippe Pétain, who ruled the country after Nazi Germany overran it.
Unity, in such a situation, would not involve putting on a “Pétain 1944” cap. Of course, the White House knows this febrile rhetoric is a lie, but it’s counted on everyone involved to pretty much play along with said lie — because, after four years of runaway inflation, an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis, and geopolitical chaos from Israel to Ukraine to Taiwan, this is literally all they’ve got.
And here’s Joe Biden, wearing a Trump hat, apparently without the sense to play along, to decline and say, “Look, you can have your opinion, but I have mine, and you’ve heard it.” He can’t even properly follow the narrative his own bubble has put together for him and his successor.
Remember that when they tell you how great, how bold, how moderate Kamala Harris is, and how dangerous Donald Trump is: They told you this guy was fit to occupy the Oval Office until 2029 just eight weeks ago.
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