His Fraudulency has announced that today marks the start of “National Character Counts Week.” These passages, which you can find on the Trump’s White House website, are so unintentionally soaked with irony that you risk drowning just by reading it:
“The foundation of any free and virtuous society is the moral character of its people…Every opportunity to show consideration for another person is also an opportunity to build habits of kindness and strengthen our character…Throughout this week, we recommit to being more kind, loving, understanding, and virtuous.”
Dare we wonder whether Trump is taking his own “kind” and “loving” and “virtuous” advice? On Friday, he signed the Character Counts proclamation; on Saturday, cocooned with his rally saps, he stoked fresh hatred for the Michigan governor who’d been targeted for kidnapping and murder by domestic terrorists inspired by Trump’s hateful rhetoric. That’s our boy.
The clincher came earlier today, when one of the C-list Trump family members, daughter-in-law Lara (wife of Eric), was asked on CNN whether Trump’s new attack on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was…how shall we put this…evidence of low character. Nah, she replied, “He was having fun at a Trump rally. It’s a fun, light atmosphere.”
Lara, who was booked on State of the Union only because the White House refused to make virtually anyone else available, was not pressed to explain daddy-in-law’s mocking of Whitmer fulfilled the goals of Character Week. Besides, she had another target in mind.
Her purpose, during Character Week, was to depict Joe Biden as a drooling puddle of senile incoherence.
“Joe Biden,” she said, “is very clearly in cognitive decline.” That charge didn’t seem very kind or loving or virtuous – or accurate, for that matter, given what Americans saw during his Thursday town hall, where Biden fielded every intricate issue from Covid to energy to infrastructure without once sounding remotely like a candidate for Memory Care. Nor does it seem politically smart, given the concerns long shared by many Republican strategists that targeting Biden’s mental acumen is a turnoff for senior voters.
But hey, the Trump family, desperate to keep the paterfamilias in power and safe from prosecution, doesn’t have much else to offer by way of campaign ammo. Not at this late date, especially now that Russia’s anti-Biden disinformation, channeled through Murdoch’s New York Post and Rudy Giuliani, has collapsed like an ill-cooked souffle. So they gotta try something, right?
Lara has been trying to sell the drooling-Biden theme all year long. Last winter she said, “Every time he comes on stage, I’m like ‘Joe, can you get it out? Let’s get the words out, Joe.'” Today, when CNN host Jake Tapper played that clip, he reminded Lara that Biden has worked hard to overcome a stutter. To which she actually said, “I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter.”
Shouldn’t it be wrong to lie so blatantly during Character Week?
Biden’s history as a stutterer has been common knowledge these past nine years, ever since he discussed it in People magazine. Chris Christie, one of Trump’s Covid-positive campaign advisers, said recently that their debate strategy was to goad Biden into stuttering. (Did Lara, also a campaign adviser, not know that?) Last year, husband Eric told Fox News that “Biden can’t get through two sentences without stuttering.” (Did Lara not know that?) And last year, ex-Trump flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted at Biden, telling him that his long fight to overcome stuttering was “commendable.” (Did Lara not know that?)
That issue aside today, Lara tried to say that Biden is a fossil who’s losing his marbles. Which prompted Tapper to say, “I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s ‘cognitive decline’.” Which prompted Lara to insist, “I’m not diagnosing him” – as she proceeded to say that Biden on stage is “struggling” to answer questions, which is “very concerning to a lot of people that this could be the leader of the free world.” (Personally, I think it’s more concerning that the current so-called leader of the free world thinks that wind power causes cancer and that disinfectant injections can fight Covid. But that’s just me.)
Republicans used to care about “character.” Back when Bill Clinton was canoodling with Monica Lewinsky, they called it the truest test of a president’s fitness. Yet today, most of them remained pathetically tethered to a guy who (among other things) buys the silence of a porn star sex partner, mocks the disabled, stokes domestic terrorist fervor, and, with the aid of family members, peppers his opponent with ageist smears.
The first line of Trump’s week-long proclamation says: “The foundation of any free and virtuous society is the moral character of its people.” It’s perverse that his signature would adorn any document containing the phrase “moral character.” But there is now abundant evidence – finally, on the cusp of the ’20 election – that a decisive percentage of our people yearn for a leader who can set a good example.