Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

They’re both old. Don’t focus on their gaffes or their age. It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, or that Joe Biden mistook the president of Egypt for the president of Mexico. What they say intentionally and deliberately is what matters. 

Trump was just doing what he does every day, telling yet another lie at yet another rally. He was trying to say that Pelosi turned down an offer he never made of “10,000 troops” on Jan. 6, 2021. The truth is, after Nancy Pelosi had been evacuated from the Capitol, she finally got Mike Pence on the phone, and he called the Pentagon and authorized the deployment of National Guard soldiers to help quell the ongoing insurrection caused by Donald Trump.

What Joe Biden was talking about when he referred to Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the president of Mexico rather than Egypt was the fact that in a call to El-Sisi early in the Gaza war, Biden was able to convince the Egyptian president to open the border between Gaza and Egypt so that aid could reach Gazan refugees fleeing the conflict that was then taking place mostly in Gaza’s north.

What presidents say matters. So does what presidential candidates say. Committing gaffes as they say it doesn’t matter. Trump’s naming of Nikki Haley instead of Nancy Pelosi as “being responsible” for the assault on the Capitol very definitely matters. She did not cause the assault on the Capitol. As Speaker of the House, Pelosi was in overall charge of security for the House of Representatives part of the Capitol, and as such, she carried out that duty effectively and with great command presence, as film taken that day of her has proved beyond any doubt.

There is no film of Donald Trump taken in his private dining room off the Oval Office while he was watching the insurrection he caused as it was taking place. Leaders from his own party who were under assault at the Capitol couldn’t even reach him on the telephone.

We know all this. The facts of what happened on that day were established by the January 6 Committee in their hearings and in the definitive report issued by the committee that no reasonable person has argued with, and which has been used as a roadmap by the Department of Justice in more than 1,000 indictments, including the indictment of Trump himself by Special Counsel Jack Smith whose office was established by the Department of Justice and to which he reports.

We also know that Joe Biden stutters. Decades ago, he told the story of his life-long struggle with occasionally stuttering. We know that Donald Trump occasionally slurs his words and frequently confuses one person with another or gets the location of his rally wrong. Hell, at a deposition for the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, he mistook a photo of Ms. Carroll taken around the time of his sexual assault on her with his then wife, Marla Maples.

None of this has bearing on the fitness of either Biden or Trump for office. What does have bearing, however, is what each man says about the intentions and plans he has if either of them wins the office of president in November of this year. 

So, let’s take a look at what Donald Trump has said he will do if he is elected.

Trump has promised to end the Affordable Care Act, which in 2023 alone provided health insurance to more than 40 million Americans. He says that at every rally, clear as a bell.

Trump has promised to privatize Medicare, turning the entire program over to the private corporations who run Medicare Advantage. Private health insurance companies have an overhead of 12 to 18 percent. Medicare’s overhead is two percent. Privatizing Medicare would be the biggest disaster for this country since the Great Depression.

Just yesterday, Trump bragged that while president, he told a president of a “large” European country that if his country was “delinquent” in its budget for NATO, he would not follow the NATO treaty’s Article 5 and come to the defense of that country if attacked by Russia. At a rally in South Carolina yesterday, Trump bragged that he told the European president, if Russia attacked his country, “I would not protect you, In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.” 

Said the man who has bragged he has been sued hundreds of times for not paying bills associated with contractors he has done business with.

Trump has promised to use the Department of Justice to “go after” the family of Joe Biden if he is elected. He has promised to “round up” millions of undocumented immigrants and keep them in detention camps near the border until he deports them.

That is just a smattering of the crimes Trump has made no secret of promising to commit if elected.

Joe Biden has made promises, too. He has promised to build more charging stations around the country for electric cars. He has promised to approve more projects for solar and wind electrical generation. He has promised to use the authority his administration was recently granted to negotiate with drug companies to lower the Medicare cost of ten drugs specified under the law. He has promised to push for more authority to negotiate the prices for more drugs prescribed under Medicare.

Trump recently mistook Victor Orban as the president of Turkey rather than Hungary, but he has been otherwise immodest about his admiration for dictators like Orban, Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. 

Joe Biden has been unstinting in his criticism of the same men. He’s even gotten right the countries that they lead.

You get the picture. It isn’t the gaffes made by these two old men in their contest to become the next president of the United States. It is what they have said clearly and distinctly about their intentions should they be elected.

One of them wants to end the NATO alliance and be a “dictator on day one.” The other wants to honor our NATO treaty obligations to defend Europe from Russia in a second presidential term. 

Vote for the stutterer, not the lying rapist indicted with 91 felonies. It’s important.