As an astonished nation continues to contemplate our assisted-living presidential race, two developments are now impossible to ignore.
First, the obvious, is that Joe Biden should have been removed from office by elected leaders, with the best interest of the nation as a whole at heart, invoking the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
That amendment codifies the procedure for the transfer of power after a president dies in office or for removing a president from office when he is unable to perform his duties.
The exact text reads, "the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." It does not instruct the Congress to retain the president if he can discharge his duties in fits and starts.
If this was a real country, Congress would direct Biden to take a cognitive test as part of an investigation into his fitness to stay in office.
That won’t happen because everyone knows what the result would be.
The Metamucil administration would be over.
Joe Biden is the figurehead on the ship of state.
The administration is really run by "Doctor" Jill Biden and a coterie of Barack H. Obama holdovers. None of whom have been elected president.
This isn’t news.
What is news is that even Donald Trump appears to have lost a step in recent years.
We’ll grant you that spending most of your time raising money to support law firms in the lifestyles to which they are accustomed would wear anyone down.
And the specter of bankruptcy or a prison term if Trump loses one or more of the show trial lawsuits he is facing, would make even someone who was not Joe Biden appear to be short and snappy.
What we do see, which is most ominous for the future, is that Trump is losing his humor fastball. He’s not the same candidate he was in 2016.
Take the Dept. of Injustice’s decision not to prosecute America’s Favorite Grandfather, Joe Biden, for retaining classified documents.
Fox News related Special Counsel Robert Hur’s thinking on his decision not to recommend prosecution, "The special counsel also described Biden as 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.
'We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,' Hur wrote in the report.
"Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone from whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.
"It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."
Cutting to the chase, Hur doesn’t believe Biden is mentally competent and putting that bumbler on the witness stand would be a disaster for the prosecution.
That conclusion would have provided weeks of merriment in the 2016 Trump campaign, when Trump still had a sense of humor. But instead, this year we get: 'Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, ripped the Hur report as an example of a 'two-tiered system of justice.'
Trump complained, "The Biden Documents Case is 100 times different and more severe than mine. I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more. What Biden did is outrageously criminal - He had 50 years of documents, 50 times more than I had, and 'WILLFULLY RETAINED' them."
All caps or not, we think Trump missed a golden opportunity to make the case about the presidential election and not about him.
We think the 2016 Trump would have said something like this, "I’ve got good news and bad news today from the Biden Department of Justice and MY GOOD FRIEND MERICK GARLAND.
"The good news is the DOJ has found Joe Biden isn’t mentally competent to stand trial for possessing classified documents. He’s at least a SANDWICH SHORT OF A PICNIC and maybe a few bags of chips, too.
"So, if influence–peddling Joe isn’t fit to sit in the witness stand, HOW IS HE FIT TO SIT IN THE OVAL OFFICE?
"The bad news is the same DOJ knows I’m not a doddering old fool and I am QUALIFIED TO SIT IN THE OVAL OFFICE . . . AGAIN . . . so it still intends to persecute me in a series of kangaroo court cases.”
That type of response sounds more like the old Trump and it has the advantage of turning the issue back toward who is competent to be in the White House and who isn’t.
It also makes Trump look confident, less beleaguered and quick on his feet.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker's bureau. Read Michael Reagan's Reports — More Here.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher for the League of American Voters, and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now With Added Humor!)" Read Michael Shannon's Reports — More Here.