We are better off knowing neither the way our supper is made nor the way our government operates, according to a trite old saying.  ,
Although its best-known form, which compares the doing of regulations to the making of meatballs, is frequently mistaken as Otto von Bismarck, the clever noble-born director of the Jacobin Club who had committed suicide more than endured a second prison under Robespierre, it appears to have first been printed in 1798.
Prior to the development of radio or television, the saying expressed gratitude for a fact: Some people in the country had already slaughtered and butcheted their own meat and worked in the fields that produced the grain for their bread.  ,
Some people heard their leaders speak for extended periods of time on symbolic occasions or heard them speak for it. Some people who had not been thoroughly published and prepared speeches or works by their rulers.
The internal workings of Elizabeth Tudor’s royal council, of Talleyrand’s or Metternich’s foreign government, of Abraham Lincoln’s government, or of Bismarck’s court, were largely unknown to the public until decades or centuries later.
Rulers were loved or despised, and they remained or fell based on the standard of management that they provided, not the standard bacon. They were chosen based solely on their laws ‘ suitability and outcomes, not on any individual traits. Having bonuses to govern effectively, they typically did so.
How illiterate was George Washington by 1797, when he ceased serving as president of the United States at the age of 65? According to the data currently available, he may have been significantly less strong in his second term than he was in his first.
Some of his people then knew that and most of them supported his state for its plans, which were generally formulated and executed by officials, notably Alexander Hamilton.
How egotistical was Pyotr I Alekseyevich, the Prince of All Russia from 1721 to his death in 1725, the ruler of Muscovy from 1682 to 1721? By any common, really, really.  , Yet he governed thus successfully that Russians have remembered him as Peter the Great and their subsequent- biggest town bears his title.
In essence, a leader’s personal character and mentality were irrelevant from the beginning of the century in that they only had an impact on the guidelines he or she pursued or the level of leadership they delivered.  ,
Rise and fall of political babysitting
When our leaders were able to appear on television in our houses to comfort us whenever any common apprehension occurred, all changed.
Even though a president cannot stop natural disasters and preventing and punishing crime is the responsibility of local institutions, not the federal government, he is widely and publicly mocked for not traveling to the page of a natural disaster to console its subjects or to provide apologies to the victims of a much-publicized crime.  ,
During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt honed the art of public nannying through radio during times when, admittedly, Americans needed a little nannying.  ,
In the age of television, our rulers have developed that art to include visual appearance. They assiduously steer clear of the error widely believed to have cost Richard Nixon the 1960 US presidential election, namely that they did n’t use enough makeup for the first of his nationally televised debates against John Kennedy, which was the first of its kind to take place in the US.
Many of us now hear and see our rulers, just as we do family and friends, and we need to know more about them. Many of us even place the expectation that our rulers will act best for us as though we are dating or having an affair with them.
This development is more pronounced in the US, where the president is both head of government and head of state, than in other Western countries where the head of government is not head of state. A US president can now and frequently does so to try to win votes from his or her head of state functions.  ,
Consequently, the advent of radio and television led to an expansion of the president’s head- of- state functions into public and publicized comforting, consoling, reassuring and ego- boosting – functions largely outside the purview of the presidency as recently as a century ago.
However, it appears as though the growing level of political conflict in the US has recently caused voters to care less about a president’s personality, appearance, or mental fortitude in relation to his policies.
Biden’s pointless senility
Since years before the nationally- televised Biden- Trump debate of June 27, 2024, it has been obvious, to anyone who has paid even a little attention to US public affairs, not only that Biden is increasingly senile but also that his performance of presidential functions has been directed by or through advisors and handlers with deliberately low public profiles.
That is simply irrelevant for any American who, in spite of decades of systematic political infantilization, does not need a personal relationship with a nannying president. What matters is the level of governance that the Biden administration has provided over the past four years, as well as the appropriateness or outcomes of the policies it has proposed or pursued.  ,
If Biden is re-elected, similar governance and policies can be anticipated, whichever comes first, until his death or the end of his second term.
Whatever interests are currently in charge of Biden will continue to rule him if he is re-elected, either through the same advisors and handlers or by someone else of their choosing. That is true regardless of who those advisors and handlers may be. Their identities and particular roles are unimportant.
In the recently released second half of Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel” Dune,” the high priestess of a cult who covertly spies on a galactic empire to install as emperor a young man who is all-knowing to be psychopath.  ,
She explains to one of her protégé priestesses that the key is not whether this prospective emperor is a psychopath or not, but that the high priestess knows how to control him.
There is abundant evidence that Biden can be controlled, and how much he has been controlled and will continue to be controlled if re-elected.  , His senility, like the psychopathy of the prospective emperor in” Dune”, is immaterial.
Trump’s egomania is so irrelevant.
Donald Trump’s egomania is no less irrelevant for any American who has not been raised with the idea of a personal relationship with the president. Trump has unabashedly displayed his egomania to the American public for half a century. Even before 2016, a description of its numerous public manifestations could fill a book.
However, Trump did a remarkable job of turning the Republican Party from a fat cats ‘ party into a socially conservative populist party when he won the nomination in 2016. He was also elected president.
Policies that a second Trump administration will implement are comparable to those of a second Biden administration. Trump tried more than any other president in the history of his first administration to keep his campaign promises.
There is no reason to think that he will not do so again and his 2024 campaign promises are both candid and similar to his 2016 and 2020 campaign promises. Although the majority of Trump supporters are aware of his flaws, they are also impressed by his policies and rhetoric.  ,
Trump uses facts in ways that no one else who could get a significant hearing before 2016 was willing to share. One such truth is that America’s ruling elites, abetted by academia, the media and the federal bureaucracy, have impoverished American workers by their ceaseless quest for access to cheap foreign labor through free trade with poor countries and immigration from poor countries.
Other examples of such truths include the notion that social justice is not merely or even primarily based on race, gender, or sexual preference, that there are many different genders of people, that white skin does not necessarily make one evil, and that excluding Muslims from the US is a less expensive, more compassionate, and more effective way to stop Islamist violence than annexing Muslim nations.
Additionally, Trump’s actions during his first year of office were incredibly in line with his campaign rhetoric. Lest we forget: Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1932 campaign, promised to balance the federal budget, Lyndon Johnson, in 1964, promised not to send US troops to Vietnam, and Bill Clinton, in 1992, vehemently opposed free trade with China. Each of them did the disproportional thing that he had preached. Trump did n’t do that.
Why character and mental acuity now matter less
Advocates of electing a president based solely on personal characteristics point to the necessity of good character and mental fortitude in an unforeseen crisis. Do you want a senile dotard’s finger or an egomaniac’s finger on the nuclear trigger, as they frequently mention the possibility of a nuclear war?
However, an egomaniac’s finger was on the nuclear trigger for four years during which relations with other nuclear- armed countries were never allowed to become so bad as to threaten nuclear war.  ,
For the past four years, a more senile dotard’s finger has been on the nuclear trigger, with the first major war in Europe since 1945 breaking out. Relations with both Russia and China have deteriorated, but the chance of a nuclear war has remained undetermined.  ,
A president is also subject to a number of restrictions that prevent him from starting a nuclear war out of egotism or senility. General Mark Milley’s insubordinate but never-punished actions as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff limited then-president Trump’s nuclear options from late October 2020 through January 2021 illustrate that.  ,
The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution has a potential use, among other things, to prevent a president from using nuclear weapons without justification.
The constraints on a senile or egomaniacal president might be weaker, and his mental acuity and character might matter more, but that is uncertain, as are all aspects of unknown and unforeseeable contingencies.
A president’s character and mental acuity may seem to matter less when perceived problems are chronically worsening and threaten to become critical than when potentially grave problems are sporadic but frequent.  ,
The Berlin crises, the Korean War, and the Cuban missile crisis, all of which threatened nuclear war, were a sporadic but frequent, potentially grave issues that the Cold War had. Under those conditions, a president’s character and mental acuity seemed to matter greatly.  ,
However, Robert Kennedy’s restraint of his brother’s bellicosity, which was the most severe of those crises, the Cuban missile crisis, prevented nuclear war.
America’s perceived issues have been chronically worsening in recent years and now threaten to become critical. The country’s biggest issue is the decade-long expansion of populism, according to the ruling elites, academia, the media, and the federal bureaucracy, according to the ruling elites and academic community.  ,
The greatest issues for populists are decades-long impoverishment of the working class caused by free trade and immigration to provide cheap labor for the rich to employ, decades-long and worsening cultural decay, decades-long growth of federal government debt that threatens to cripple, decades-long ideologization of all institutions, and decades-long growing intolerance and demonization of dissent from an ideology that only defines social justice in terms of race, gender, and sexual preference and is unconcerned with inequality
Populists believe that democracy has been in decline for decades, but they also believe it is deteriorating. They perceive the ruling elites as resorting since 2016 to increasingly undemocratic means in order to curtail the populist threat to their interests and expect them to continue to do so.
A president’s character and mental acuity do n’t matter as much in these circumstances as they did during the Cold War. And American voters are much more adept at understanding this than their politicians and experts.
Despite the panic of Democratic Party politicians and pro- Democratic media since the June 27 debate displayed the extent of Biden’s senility, neither Biden’s job approval rating nor the proportion of voters planning to vote for him seems to have dropped more than about two percentage points as of July 6.
Additionally, as memory of that debate fades, the erosion of Biden’s support is likely to diminish as other highly publicized events bring it into focus.
Similar to how the majority of media pundits and the numerous politicians from both parties who had opined that Trump had no chance of winning the presidency were misled by voters in November 2016 after The Washington Post released a transcript of a 2005 recording in which he admitted to telling a TV show host that he did” try and f*ck” a married woman before appearing on his show and that “women ] let you do anything.” Just grab them by the p*ssy, please.
Admittedly, pollsters report that a minority of Americans, many of them young, claim to be unwilling to vote for Biden because he’s too old, and that another minority of US voters, many of them college- educated women, claim to be unwilling to vote for Trump because he’s too nasty.
However, for the majority of Americans, the political conflict between the nation’s ruling elites and populists who want to end those elites ‘ political and cultural dominance has grown so much that it is no longer necessary to have a kind, attractive, comforting, and ego-stoking ruler on the boob tube.  ,
The battle lines have been drawn and most Americans will choose a side based on considerations more compelling than which side offers the better nanny.