Ward on Words

Donald Trump, a candidate for president of the United States, the other night promised his "beautiful Christian' supporters in attendance at a Turning Point Action event in Florida that if they voted for  him in 2024, " You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” It is remarkable to see a candidate promise that "you're not going to have to vote" any more if he wins in November. Democracies are fragile things; voting is one of the few ways that citizens can engage in holding elected officials accountable. There has never been a president thus far who has "fixed things" in ways that people no longer need to vote. In fact, as noted by Brian Klass in The Atlantic , " He’s telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight." You would never know that, however, from the landing page of yesterday's New York Times that a preside...

It has been an eventful summer in America, and the last month has been incredible to witness.  On June 27, Donald Trump and Joe Biden met in a debate; the performance of the 81-year-old president was disastrous and in the days and weeks since then, there has been a steady drip of news stories asking him to withdraw from the race. Nothing he did post-debate assured Americans that he had the energy and stamina to engage in a brutal presidential campaign and the news coverage of his age and infirmities never stopped. His opponent is just three years younger than him, but there has not been a similar avalanche of stories about his age and his infirmities. It is unclear why the age of one of the elderly men running for president is considered newsworthy, and the age of the other has been ignored for the most part.  Jennifer Schulze, a Chicago-based journalist, did an accounting of the age-related news stories that ran in just one outlet - the New York Times - after the debate up un...