Well, the inevitable happened. Joe Biden decided not to run for re-election. No, it’s not because he forgot, but because he caught covid-19 and went into self-isolation. That meant he had to leave the campaign trail just when he was supposed to have been gearing up for the party’s convention, for which he had already sewn up the delegates, as he was supposed to have done. (No sitting Democrat president has ever sought re-nomination and been refused, and only one Republican, Chester Alan Arthur, in 1884)
I suspect that he got some me time, which allowed him to assess how he was doing. Look, he’s 82, he’s been President of his country. So he probably realized that it was better to leave while he had most of his marbles. Rather than at the end of another four years, when the weight of the world on his shoulders would have made would have greatly speeded up the progress of his illness, and if he had shuffled out of the White House, not knowing what day it was, what place it was, or even who he was.
I wonder. I can remember another old man, Françoid Miterrand, who was re-elected President of France for a second seven-year term in 1988. He was diagnosed with [prostate cancer, but kept it concealed, completing his term in May 1995. In January 1996, he died of that cancer. That might be how Joe Biden would like to go.
Frankly, I’m not sure that Donald Trump will be much better. After all, he will also hit Biden’s age by the time his term comes to an end. No one really wishes the USA to go through the trauma of a presidential death, the last one, that of John F. Kennedy in 1965 being particularly disturbing. It might have been behind Miterrand’s wish to spare France the trauma of a presidential death.
Still, the next time his party took the Presidency, the holder of the office put France through not so much a trauma as an embarrassment, when he was photographed on a scooter, sneaking at night from the Elysee Palace to go to his mistress.
The Socialists have been an embarrassment for France. Miterrand may not have died in office, but the nation was shocked or perhaps amused, to find out that he had an illegitimate daughter. Well, Trump is around to embarrass Americans. He will be elected, and then take office, as a convicted criminal. And the crime is not murder or even bank robbery, but tax fraud. That’s the same offence for which Al Capone was jailed. But Al Capone got it in the neck because he was bootlegging. Trump has been convicted because he gave money to a strip dancer to help him hide their affair,
It would have played out very well over here. One of most popular leaders has been convicted of various offences, including that of suborning the affections of another man’s wife, while his ex-wife brings up a girl with whom his connection remains murky. Is ge as Teflon as Trump? There’s no stripper involved in his story, just as there’s no khwaja sirah in Tump’s
There are other re0nances. Imran just admires real-estate tycoons. Trump is one. Trump has twitted Biden about his age, while Imran seeks the youth vote.
Is Maryam Nawaz going to be Imran’s Kamala Harris? It’s a little difficult to imagine Mian Nawaz as a Jamaican. It’s even more difficult to imagine him as an academic.
