A growing number of online supporters of former President Donald Trump accuse Reaganite conservatives of not “knowing what time it is,” with the implication that the old laissez-faire agenda is an outdated political loser and must be replaced with a more collectivist one that more forcefully uses the government to stop leftist cultural incursions.
The reality, according to the polls, might be much simpler. The candidate who can win in 2024 may simply be the one who knows “what time it is” in a literal sense. And for that reason, perhaps more than any other, President Joe Biden is tanking in the polls because he does not seem to know even what year it is.
On Sunday, the 81-year-old incumbent confused Emmanuel Macron, France’s Gen X president, with predecessor Francois Mitterrand, who was born when Russia was still a monarchy and the Ottomans still had an Empire.
“Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England,” Biden said, “and I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterrand from Germany — I mean France — looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for?'”
For reference, Mitterrand died in 1996, before Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, was even an Illinois state legislator.
Speaking at a New York fundraiser three days later, Biden then mistook former German Chancellor Angela Merkel with her predecessor Helmut Kohl.
“And then Helmut Kohl turned to me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times and learned that 1,000 people had broken down the doors of the British Parliament, killed some bobbies on the way in, to deny the prime minister to take office?” Biden said in yet another rehash of the 2020 election.
Merkel, who was born in 1954, stepped down as chancellor three years ago. Kohl, who was born in 1930, stepped down more than a quarter century ago.
It’s not that Biden’s presumptive general election opponent is any spring chicken. The 77-year-old Trump has also committed a baffling case of mistaken identity, accusing his former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley of failing to provide adequate security for the Capitol in the aftermath of the 2020 election. (Yes, hell is just reliving 2020 and its aftermath over and over and over again.)
“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” Trump said during a speech in New Hampshire last month. “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”
At least for Trump, he mistook Haley for Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker who, at minimum, is still alive and in public office, unlike either Kohl or Mitterrand.
The incredibly relative cognitive advantage Trump retains over Biden is reflected in the polling.
In the latest NBC News poll, Trump has a 5-point overall lead over Biden with the national electorate. Trump’s greatest asset is immigration, the topic that risks eclipsing the economy in importance to voters and where NBC poll respondents gave Trump a 35-point lead. But Trump’s second-greatest advantage is the fact that voters broadly agree he is simply more coherent than the increasingly and undeniably brain-fogged Biden.
By a 23-point margin, voters say Trump has more of the “necessary mental and physical health to be president.” By a 16-point margin, voters favor Trump’s basic competence and efficacy.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Biden’s backers like to argue inane counterfactuals, pretending that Biden’s weakness didn’t encourage the foreign policy conflagrations from Ukraine to Israel, his immigration policies didn’t create the crisis along the southern border, and his $2 trillion American Rescue Plan didn’t trigger the worst inflation in 40 years. Technically, they argue, you can’t prove that these things wouldn’t have happened under Trump.
But what nobody can deny is that for all of his faults, Trump indeed seems to know what time it is. Biden doesn’t even know what year it is, let alone who his allies across the world stage actually are.
