Biden Should Call Trump a “Sick F**k” in Public. Real America Agrees.

We learned this week, via Jonathan Lemire and some Politico colleagues, that Joe Biden uses salty language about Donald Trump in private. He’s a “sick fuck” and a “fucking asshole.” During his Valley Forge speech commemorating the January 6 insurrection, the president almost let it slip in public: “At his rally, he jokes about an intruder, whipped up by the Big Trump Lie, taking a hammer to Paul Pelosi’s skull. And he thinks that’s funny. He laughed about it. What a sick …”

The White House declined to comment for the record, but this was obviously put out there by administration sources just to test the reaction. Well, here’s mine: Biden should just go ahead and say it publicly. Not all the time of course. But once or twice. It won’t hurt. Most likely it will help. Might help a lot, in fact.

This is so for two basic reasons that people in politics sometimes forget about inside their pressure bubbles. The first is that it’s genuine. If it’s what he thinks, then he ought to just own it. People hear politicians calibrate their words every day (well, except Trump, but even he does it sometimes, notably with respect to a federal abortion ban). To hear someone just let it rip is refreshing.

Reason two? A hell of a lot of people agree. The ones who don’t are loud and enraged, and they command not one but three propaganda television networks (Fox, One America, Newsmax). But I’m betting that your average American—middle class, not very political, guided by conventional morals and values, not angry at either Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce—thinks Donald Trump is a sick fuck.

The success of such a play would depend on the evidence Biden would introduce to reinforce the label. It can’t be political. He led an insurrection? No. That’s partisan. He separated children from their parents and kept them in cold barracks with Mylar blankets? That’s plenty bad, but it’s still just politics.

The best evidence is above politics. Like Trump’s habit of insulting soldiers. Biden hit the right note in the Valley Forge speech: “[Trump] referred to those heroes, and I quote, as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’ He actually said that. How dare he say that. How dare he talk about my son and all like that. Look, I call them patriots and heroes. The only loser I see is Donald Trump.” (Biden believes son Beau’s brain cancer, the cause of his death, stemmed from his exposure to burn pits in Iraq during his service.)

The Paul Pelosi story is a pretty good piece of evidence too. Yes, the name Pelosi will set off the inevitable bells on both sides. But I doubt many swing voters think it’s OK to joke about taking a hammer to an 82-year-old man’s head. We might throw in what Trump said about John McCain back in 2015 (“I like heroes who weren’t captured”).

Trump, as we know, leads Biden narrowly in most polls (and in some state polls, not so narrowly). At the same time, large majorities agree that Trump is a lawless and reckless and just bad human being.

Here are some poll results from last summer, which are in line with a ton of other polls. Popularity—unfavorable, 60 to 38 percent. Does Trump think he’s above the law? Yes, 63 to 37. Do you support or oppose Trump’s indictments? Yes, 53 to 39. Do you think Trump has committed a crime? Yes, 62 to 32. And the most germane one here, is Trump fit for office? No, 58 to 42.

Why, you might ask, is a man with those numbers leading in polls? First of all, because Joe Biden is 80. If Biden were 75, he’d be six, seven points ahead, no question about it. And second, because those average swing voters have forgotten everything they didn’t like about Trump, while they see every day the things they don’t like about Biden—his age, and his inflation (although things are improving considerably on that front).

This campaign—and not panicking about January’s head-to-head polls—is going to be an exercise in reminding those voters of the things they hated about Trump. In some ways, Trump will do that work himself. He’s already doing it, defaming a woman he raped, misbehaving in courtrooms, getting convicted of more crimes (we hope), ranting against the legal system, the one venue where his bullshit doesn’t fly. By late October, a lot of people will have observed his campaign-season antics and be asking themselves whether they really want this moral baboon in their faces for another four years. (It occurs to me that’s an insult to baboons.)

But a lot of the work will have to be done by Biden and the Democrats. Trump’s lie to the American people about the seriousness of the coronavirus. His serial bragging about getting rid of Roe v. Wade. His love of Vladimir Putin. His increasing dementia, far worse than Biden’s. And his basic sociopathy and inhumanity. If driving home that last point home means Biden should use a rather unpresidential noun here and there, well, fuck it.