The president of the United States took to Twitter this morning and lashed out at former Vice President Joe Biden over his macho remarks at yesterday’s speech at the University of Miami, bringing us the undesired and rather tedious spectacle of having two politicians in their seventies engaging in an absurd back-and-forth about how one would dominate the other in a street brawl.
Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018
Biden’s remarks yesterday were not particularly helpful to anybody, though I think we can all agree with the sentiment behind it.
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere, and she likes it,. They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’ ”
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life. I’m a pretty [darn] good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”
It’s clear why the notoriously thin-skinned Trump, who is desperately looking for anything to distract the public from the three lawsuits being filed against him by his ex-mistresses/sex assault victims and the looming specter of Robert Mueller and the Trump-Russia investigation, responded in such a fashion.
Utterly incapable of letting even the slightest jab go without a challenge, Trump decided to wade into the muck and treat our nation to a description of how he might have beat up Joe Biden in a schoolyard, apparently not having matured very much in the seventy or so years since he’s been in one.
That much we expect from Trump, who famously bragged about the size of his penis at a debate and has spent the majority of his time in office making up rude nicknames for his political enemies.
But we expect better from Joe Biden. While President Trump certainly deserves to be hit with the hammer of justice for his decades of sexual assault, Biden’s high-school fantasies are not helpful to anybody.
His talk of childish vigilantism perpetuate outdated stereotypes of toxic masculinity that play a huge role in exacerbating and perpetuating our nation’s epidemic of sexual harassment and assault, and while we appreciate his enthusiasm and the sentiment behind the remarks, he had to have known how Trump would react to it at this point – and now he’s provided Trump with yet another helpful distraction from the things we actually need to expend our time and attention on.
