I try to avoid nakedly partisan output, especially in this forum. I give my self a little more leeway on social media, but still try to remain within reason. And over my entire liftetime, the intellectual capability of the president has always been a target for insult (sometimes horrifically so) by the opposition party. But we have arrived, at some point in the preceding months or years depending on your vantage, at the arrival of a sitting President who genuinely appears to be limited in his ability to self-regulate.
If you let the post play, it shows 7 posts over 10 minutes. The rapidity of posts is, I believe, relevant because it signals that it is unlikely to be the product of a staffer in charge of his social media. PR staff would, regardless of content, prefer that posts each have their own time at the top of the feed to generate attention. By firing off so many posts in rapid sequence, each post is buried by the subsequent. This is not professional PR.
As for the posts, it is precisely the kind of content that would generate a lot of interest from juveniles and those in cognitive decline. It’s the kind of slop, AI or otherwise, that gets a lot of attention from individuals with zero opportunity cost of time on Facebook. Read in conjunction with the all-caps posts of threats to ban trade with whole swaths of the globe and other similarly illegal executive actions, it’s just part of the evermounting evidence that the President is not in full control of his impulses. Putting aside what Thomas Schelling would say about fragility and faillings of madman theories of conflict, it’s brings up one of the most important reforms we can and should be pushing for in the next administration.
Age limits on representation.
Reliable, unbiased cognitive tests would be first-best, of course, but the problem there is a) failure is endogenous to the control of the branch administrering them, and b) extrication in the wake of a failure is the kind of stress test that our system does not seem up to at the moment. For all of it’s coarseness, counting days since the record of your birth is straightforward and relatively easy to enforce before being allowed on the ballot in the first place.
One of the realities of modern medicine is that our ability to preserve the body is likely to outpace our ability to preserve the mind at a level adequeate to the task of high representative office. At the same time, our abilitty to extricate and replace someone unfit to their duties in the public sector will likely always be limited relative to similar processes in the private market, where executive services will always be at will in any context where the executive is not themselves the owner.
From a public choice/political economy perspective, age limits will not be an easy legislative or constitutional feat. Representatives will always favor the status quo rules that helped them get their job and subsequently keep it. This is only made more complicated by the basic human optimism regarding our own current and future capacities. And perhaps the simplest obstruction is also the biggest: the reward for winning an election is the expected incumbent advantage in the next election. To limit the prospective future terms for any sitting official, in their current position or the one they aspire to, is to reduce the value of what they already earned, and nobody likes that.
In the face of all that, however, remains a simple truth. The citizens of the United States and the broader world are all made less safe by a sitting President whose self-control and capacity to understand complex contexts has waned well-beyond the threshold of reliable decision-making. That’s a cost big enough and bad enough, wrapped in all the risk aversion and loss-aversion who can possibly imagine, that it should at least have a chance to motivate real legislative action. At least a chance.
Anyway, happy Labor Day.
Economist Writing Every Day 