In terms of optics and in terms of energy, I wish President Biden were younger. There’s no point in pretending otherwise. And from the casual conversations all around me and the formal polling of voters, I know I’m in robust company. A great many Americans consider his age unideal, and that belief is why there’s no wishing away the focus on it. The swell of attention to it over the past few months is more beginning than end. There are tsunamis yet to come.
Even so, aspects of the subject actually get too little consideration, starting with this crushingly obvious and yet frequently overlooked fact: The presidency isn’t a solo mission. Not even close. It’s a team effort, and the administration that a president puts together matters much, much more than his brawn or his brio.
To listen to the fretting over how many hours a day Biden can vigorously work, how many speeches he can authoritatively deliver and how many miles he can comfortably travel is to get the sense that he’s independently on the hook for the nation’s welfare. That he’s more action figure than decision maker. That, um, he alone can fix it. That he shoulders all the responsibility.
But he’s not Atlas; he’s POTUS. And the president of the United States is only as good as the advisers around him, whose selection reflects presidential judgment, not stamina.
We acknowledge as much when we discuss how a president might fill or has filled his cabinet. We recognize that many vital decisions are made — and that most important policies are realized — outside of the Oval Office.
But that recognition weirdly dissipates when we start tallying Biden’s birthdays. We attach as much weight to digits as to discernment, or we imply that the former wipes out the latter. Yes, age can erode judgment — if a person’s cognitive health is in marked and clear decline. But Biden’s situation is more cloudy than clear, and nothing about it suggests to me that he’d treat governing as cavalierly as Donald Trump would (and did) or assemble a team as ragtag as Trump’s — or, for that matter, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s.
He wouldn’t elevate a conspiracy theorist like the quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was on a short list of potential running mates for Kennedy before, on Tuesday, Kennedy chose Nicole Shanahan, a philanthropist (and vaccine skeptic) with zero experience in public office. He wouldn’t invite anyone as unhinged and reprehensible as Rudy Giuliani, who led Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, into his inner circle.
Yes, Trump is about three and a half years younger and often peppier than Biden. Biden is about 300 times saner and always more principled than Trump. That’s the infinitely more important contrast between the two men, and we should never, not for a nanosecond, sweep it aside.
We should also call nonsense on many of the people who signal or say that Biden’s age is propelling them toward Trump. Obviously, that’s a dynamic for some of them, but it can’t be all that common because it defies common sense. Voters who’d be content to back a version of Biden with more spring in his step and less stammer in his voice have values, priorities and policy leanings that would probably render Trump an unconscionable choice. They’re not going to throw in with Trump because he throws himself around more forcefully.
Really, how many people say to themselves: Heck, Biden may be the guy with a proper respect for democracy, won’t blow air kisses at murderous tyrants and doesn’t sound like a fascist, but that Trump sure can shout louder, talk faster and clomp around more thuddingly! He’ll bring the vim to trashing democracy that Biden can’t muster for preserving it. I guess I’ll go with Trump!
No, many of these Trump supporters like what he’s selling — maybe the lower taxes for corporations and wealthy Americans, maybe the promised crackdown on immigration, maybe the nihilism, maybe just the vitriol — and have found a way to defend a vote for him (Biden’s decrepit!) without fully owning up to it.
In an age of rampant falsity, let’s be honest about that.
For the Love of Sentences
“At first spray, it smells like a stick of Land O’ Lakes marooned on a beach at low tide,” Molly Young wrote in The Times about a challenging fragrance called Miss Tranchant. “Over 10 minutes it mellows into a mesmerizing cloak of spicy vanilla with just a hint of sex-under-a-pier. I’ve received zero compliments on it and two pieces of forceful negative feedback. Miss Tranchant is perfume as not only a personal aesthetic experience but also apparently an indefensible one.” (Thanks to Beth Mauldin of Yarmouth Port, Mass., and Lizanne Wilson of Chicago, among others, for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Esau McCaulley described his experience as a Black associate professor at a school whose faculty isn’t especially diverse: “I am faced with the daily reality of my strangeness, like being a peacock in a flock of wild turkeys. The peacock is interesting and adds some color, but the fact that it is not native to the area is clear to all.” (Suzanne Starr, Vancouver, B.C.)
Carina del Valle Schorske approached a mysterious island destination in the Caribbean by boat. “I had taken off my glasses, foggy from the spray, so at first I wasn’t sure if the smudge of cream in the corner of my eye was just a trick of light,” she wrote. But then, bit by bit, “the island’s shape sharpened: a thin slice of stone floating like a cataract on the dark iris of the sea.” (Patrick McGovren, Kalamazoo, Mich., and Ted Trotta, Santa Fe, N.M., among others)
Tina Brown assessed King Charles: “Even with the best prognosis for his cancer, he has been left with a rueful rump of a reign.” (Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)
Jesse Green reviewed a new Broadway production: “Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony. At ‘The Notebook,’ I was the person next to you.” (Christopher Flores, San Antonio)
And Bret Stephens, conversing with Gail Collins, skewered the social media site affiliated with Donald Trump: “I take it you’re referring to Truth Social, which in an honest world would be renamed Lies Sociopathic.” (Ross Payne, Windermere, Fla.)
In Vox, Ian Millhiser questioned the logic of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a public Texas university’s ban on drag performances: “The idea that lewd, sexualized or otherwise titillating performances undermine a university’s ‘basic educational mission’ will come as a shock to pretty much anyone who has ever attended college.” (David Hoexter, Washington)
In her Men Yell at Me newsletter, Lyz Lenz added context to Boeing’s miserable safety record of late: “All of this is made even more terrifying by the fact that there are basically only two companies that make airplanes — Boeing and Airbus. We call it a duopoly. Which is basically a monopoly that cosplays as a free market.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)
In The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg asserted that many media figures have sacrificed their credibility on the altar of overwrought characterizations of Trump’s words: “They want to talk about blood baths, and everyone else tunes it out as bloodless bathos.” (Peter Coy, Demarest, N.J.)
And in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer made an important distinction: “Fairness, objectivity and due process are important values, but there is a difference between upholding them and seeking to convince everyone that that’s what you’re doing. Performatively pursuing the latter can easily come at the expense of the former. If you try too hard to convince people you are doing the right thing instead of just doing the right thing, you often end up doing the wrong thing.” (David Tebaldi, Worthington, Mass.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Watching, Reading and Doing
It was as if a toddler had tumbled overboard.
Several of us gasped or cried out as the wind carried the object away. We frantically searched the sea’s surface for some sign of it. And when, about two minutes later, we spotted it near the shoreline some 50 feet away, the captain of our catamaran dove into the water, swam as quickly as he could and brought it safely back to the boat.
Catastrophe averted! We had saved paradise from an empty can of beer.
That was about three weeks ago, during a trip to New Zealand, where my three siblings, their spouses and I encountered more than some of the most dazzling seascapes and landscapes we had ever seen. We also observed a respect for nature and stewardship of the environment that put the behavior of so many of us Americans to shame.
Graced with mountain lakes and coastal fjords and lush forests and birds galore, New Zealanders seem to possess a special appreciation of both the majesty and the fragility of what they have. I say “seem” because I visited this island nation only briefly, I’m going by first impressions and I’m surely generalizing.
But to connect with the natural world the way you do when moving across a patch of earth as crazily beautiful as New Zealand is to understand, in a deep and spiritual way, the moral necessity of preserving it, the sacrilege of spoiling it and how much control we have — if only we choose to exert it, if only we temper our hungers and our heedlessness.
In New Zealand, I routinely witnessed or heard about such exertions and such tempering. They were as humdrum as a store’s banishment of plastic and as ambitious as the government’s relocation of an entire species of native bird endangered by the corruption of its original habitat.
When we kayaked in Doubtful Sound, we crossed paths with no other kayakers and only a few boats: The government strictly limits activity there. Almost everywhere we hiked, we came across meticulously distributed, laboriously maintained traps for rodents and weasels that weren’t indigenous to New Zealand and, left unchecked, might wipe out yet more species of birds. We also saw hundreds of clusters of strategically planted saplings, their spindly trunks skirted with protective cylinders. Where deforestation had once occurred, reforestation was now taking place.
What an impressive campaign. And what a powerful inspiration. When you behold this kind of commitment, you internalize it, and as you do, you realize that an accretion of decisions and actions — some communal, some individual, some major, some minor — points the way toward our ecological salvation or ruin.
Had the catamaran captain not chased down that beer can, I might well have. I want the same New Zealand that took my breath away to leave people breathless for generations to come. I want to answer the gift of it with the gratitude it deserves.
