President Joe Biden has a loud-and-clear message to GOP front-runner Donald Trump and America: Don’t uhhiminauhwemerica with it, or you’ll lose out.
Got that?
That’s what our sharp-as-a-tack 81-year-old head of state had to say just hours before polls closed in New Hampshire as he was making a speech in Manassas, Virginia. I’ll be charitable and assume the choice of locale isn’t because he reads maps and calendars as well as he reads teleprompters; Biden and the Democratic National Committee have been trying to pretend the New Hampshire primary didn’t really count, since the DNC moved the “official” start of the primary season to South Carolina, and only started officially pushing a write-in campaign for the president in the Granite State when it became clear Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, his only serious primary opposition, might embarrass him there. (He didn’t.)
Instead, the Manassas rally was intended to focus on celebrating the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the overturned Supreme Court decision that made legal abortion the law of the land. He promised to do that again, naturally, and veto any national abortion ban that crossed his desk — which, given the current political landscape, is a bit like promising to negotiate a peace treaty with Superman if he turns out to be real.
Alas, the official transcript of the event wasn’t up on the White House’s website as of early Wednesday morning, so we can only speculate/take bets on what his spin artists will interpret this garbled mess as:
“Don’t mess with uhhiminauhwemerica unless you want to get the benefit.” – Cognitively Impaired Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/K1OMxyihnv
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 23, 2024
“We’ll teach Donald Trump a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with uhhiminauhwemerica unless you want to get the benefit,” Biden said.
Now, I’m giving 3-1 odds on “the women of America,” although the statement doesn’t make much more sense then. (The benefit of what? Their vote? He could just say that, you know.) However, I’m also offering 10-1 odds on “the limit of America” and 65-1 odds on “the a-wim-o-we a-wim-o-we in the jungle unless you want to get the benefit.” The point is that he tried to own Trump, and he ended up with a self-own. Nice work.
Is Joe Biden cognitively impaired?
It’s worth noting that the mush-mouthed remark came during the same speech in which Biden engaged in what the media, in other circumstances, calls “election denial:”
“Hello Virginia! And the real governor, Terry McAuliffe,” Biden began, either forgetting or just bulldozing through the fact that McAuliffe lost rather convincingly to GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2021.
Election Denier Joe Biden: “Hello, Virginia! And the real governor, Terry McAuliffe!” pic.twitter.com/NFU7Uqu0ja
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 23, 2024
I’m sure there’s a good chance that, somewhere on social media, former Harvard president Claudine Gay said that “election denial” depends on the context. There’s also a good chance that, an hour or two later, that social media post was deleted because someone noticed Gay copied it word-for-word from former University of Pennsylvania president Liz McGill’s post on the matter.
But I digress. Biden would go on to have an otherwise good day, despite the unforced errors. Phillips’ challenge to Biden in New Hampshire seems to have fallen short of expectations, with the Minnesota representative sitting at just short of 20 percent as of midnight Wednesday, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, write-ins for Biden and unprocessed write-ins — which are also likely for Biden — sit at just short of 70 percent of the total. In short, Phillips’ attempt to pull a Eugene McCarthy and send a sitting president back home to shrivel away failed.
However, the victory still doesn’t tackle the issue of whether or not Biden is “cognitively impaired,” as the Trump War Room X account put it. Poll after poll seems to say that Americans are unconvinced at best — and those who are convinced aren’t falling in the “fit as a fiddle” camp.
It would have been a nice day for Joe Biden to shut up, in other words. But that’s not how the president rolls. No, he had to celebrate the 51st anniversary of a dead Supreme Court decision and remind America that high-mileage Joe still hasn’t undergone a cognitive restoration.
Nor is this the only time in the past week that these moments have come up. Here’s Biden on Monday, mixing up his cabinet members:
WATCH – Biden can’t recognize his own Cabinet Members, thinks Alejandro Mayorkas is Xavier Becerra (who wasn’t even in the room).
This happened minutes after Karine Jean-Pierre insisted there is nothing wrong with his mental health. pic.twitter.com/GDZbFHKplZ
— The First (@TheFirstonTV) January 23, 2024
And here’s Biden last week in North Carolina, forgetting that a Democratic congresswoman wasn’t in the room:
This, in short, is the first time I can remember where an incumbent’s supporters probably chant “four more years” with a question mark as opposed to an exclamation point at the end of that statement.
And, to make matters worse, Donald Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire primary almost certainly means that — absent some kind of miracle that resembles the ’69 Mets winning the World Series, Buster Douglas winning his fight over Mike Tyson, and your 17-year-old’s hand-me-down ’92 Camry winning the Indianapolis 500 all rolled into one — Nikki Haley’s time remaining in the Republican primary process will be a short one. That means an elongated one-on-one general election campaign — and, unlike 2020, it can’t be held from anyone’s basement.
On the plus side, that gives the president’s campaign plenty of time to figure out what “uhhiminauhwemerica” means. On the downside, it gives him another 10-plus months of “uhhiminauhwemericas.” Still feeling confident about that Biden write-in, New Hampshireites?
