Former President Donald Trump sits inside Manhattan Criminal Court, on Thursday.
Mark Peterson/AP
“The 2024 election is in full swing, and yes, age is an issue,” President Joe Biden cracked at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”
Funny joke, but Donald Trump’s infantile and unstable character is no laughing matter. Political scientist Daniel Drezner, author of the book “The Toddler in Chief,” writes: “Across a range of behavioral and cognitive traits — temper tantrums, a short attention span, impulse control, oppositional behavior and knowledge deficits — Trump has much more in common with small children than with the 43 men who preceded him.”
In his speech, Biden was clearly road-testing a line of attack that voters are likely to hear constantly in the months ahead — and for good reason. On several crucial issues, Trump holds a decisive advantage over the president, including inflation, immigration and crime. Notice the White House has dropped the campaign slogan “Bidenomics” because it reminded voters of a negative — not a positive — impression.
But as Republican Nikki Haley effectively demonstrated during her primary campaign, Trump’s personal deficiencies are his deepest vulnerability. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, 57% of voters said he lacked the proper temperament to be president, while the same number agreed that he is a “risky choice” for a second term.
In an interview with Tara Palmeri of subscription news platform Puck, Trump pollster John McLaughlin identified “safety moms” as a key group that could be wooed away from Biden: “You’ve got the suburban, independent and Democrat moms who are saying illegal immigration is bringing criminals into the country, fentanyl is out of control. They’re worried about their children’s safety. They really are.”
The best way for Biden to hold on to those safety moms is to stress that Trump — not Biden — is the real threat to their families. Chaos and craziness, he should argue, pose a bigger real danger than immigrants or drugs.
And by framing the ex-president as a petty and petulant child, he paints a picture moms can easily relate to. As former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of Trump after a government shutdown in 2018: “I’m the mother of five, grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.”
But Trump as toddler is not just a Democratic campaign trope. Many of his former aides and associates use some version of the same analogy. For his book, Drezner collected more than 1,000 references to Trump’s childishness even before the 2020 election, and the score has skyrocketed since then.
A good example is Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general, who said on CBS: “He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest, there’s no question about it. … He’s like a … defiant 9-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it.”
Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump’s communications chief, co-authored an article in Salon with two psychologists that warned: “Just like a screaming and defiant young child, Trump needs to be put in timeout — indefinitely. He should be silenced. He should be sequestered.”
Foreign leaders discerned the same character flaws in Trump, noted Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia: “When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old boy who goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero.’ It’s really creepy.”
Outside advisers like James Robison, a minister who counseled Trump on spiritual matters, noticed the same. At a gathering of religious lawmakers in Texas, Robison recalled telling him “you shoot yourself in the foot every morning when you get up and open your mouth! The more you keep your mouth closed, the more successful you’re gonna be!”
A small but vocal band of Trump’s former aides are warning voters that his immeasurable immaturity should disqualify him from serving a second term. Cassidy Hutchinson, once an assistant to chief of staff Mark Meadows, told CNN: “Donald Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.” Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper added: “I think he’s unfit for office. … His actions are all about him and not about the country.”
This is the argument Biden must make, to the safety moms and other wavering voters: Do you want this man-child to run the country for four more years? Should a toddler-in-chief be the role model for your own children?
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University.
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