I have… reasonably positive memories of Jon Stewart during his first run under the bright lights of the late night TV talk-o-sphere. The Daily Show under his run had some surprisingly deep dives into the sorts of issues that the people whose job it supposedly was refused to do. He spoke (meager) truth to power in the ways that our “legacy media” either couldn’t (or actively wouldn’t) do.
But at the same time, I had noticed he had started falling for the same “both sides” horse-race driven nonsense of the people he long criticized for a while. When he stepped away, I had thought that part of the reason was because he had recognized that after some self-reflection.
(Some behind-the-scenes revelations that he struggled with internal biases and race-related prejudice didn’t endear me, either, for what its worth.)
So, I was not eagerly awaiting his return to the bright lights as much as some might have thought. I saw very little evidence that he had done the soul-searching necessary to find the groove he had during his first run on The Daily Show from the few appearances he had done in the interim.
And as a result, I was not particularly surprised that when he made his grand return… he pretty much sounded exactly like the media he once loathed, just with his typical bombast and comedic delivery.
Now, the issue here really isn’t the facts. Both men are exceedingly old. The problem is that the facts in this case don’t tell us anything particularly useful and obscure and muddy the facts that actually matter… the exact same game that the legacy media used and Jon Stewart railed against for so very long.
Joe Biden is 81. Donald Trump is 77. If I wanted these sort of cutting observations, I could find it… well… at every other legacy media outlet in the United States of America. The only thing Jon is doing differently is the delivery.
As far as the cognitive issues go; would I be surprised to learn that Biden has lost a step (or two, or three)? Nope. Dude’s 81. My grandmother at 79 couldn’t even remember the names and faces of her own children. I’d be more astonished if he was as sharp as he ever was.
But when I see Donald Trump struggling to put two thoughts together coherently without going off on some completely unrelated tangent, I refuse to believe that we (as a collective) genuinely care about this issue. It’s just the same “bothsides” nonsense to try and sound impartial without actually putting in the work to inform us as a society why it actually matters.
I really don’t care how Donald Trump pronounces “Pennsylvania.” I care about how he apparently can’t tell Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi apart.
Cognition failings should matter, just not in the way that we’re choosing it matters. The Office of the President of the United States is one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the world. Someone who says things like he would invite Russia to bully and invade members of an alliance when they don’t pay up (demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how said alliance works while recalling a conversation that nigh assuredly did not happen in the way he claims it did, if it happened at all), probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the office, for example.
Or if they slip up and say “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” at a press conference.
If you don’t want to see the difference between those two observations, then there’s little I or anyone can say that will make you.
But you’re supposed to be better than that, Jon. Or… at least, you tell us repeatedly that you are.
TKO Creations 