Washington Post headline, March 21: “Biden’s stutter surges into the presidential campaign.”
There might be a special place in hell for the editor who put the tongue-twisting phrase “stutter surges” in this story about a speaking impairment, but the more pertinent matter was in the subhead that read, “Trump mocks and exaggerates the speech impediment. Biden embraces it as reflecting compassion.”
Now we know that this isn’t an informational article intended to address a peculiarity of the election season but yet another corny attempt to cast Donald Trump as a vicious bully and Joe Biden as a dewy-eyed guardian of goodwill (gag).
From the piece, authored by Matt Viser: “Donald Trump has mocked Biden in recent weeks by falsely claiming that the president is stuttering during his speeches, and he has parodied the purported stammer on occasion, but Biden has been relying on a longtime centerpiece of his personal and political biography, embracing it to sell himself as the candidate of compassion for the 2024 presidential rematch.”
Is the stutter real or not? It can’t be both “falsely” portrayed and only a “purported stammer” when Trump refers to it while simultaneously “a longtime centerpiece” of Biden’s biography that showcases his “compassion.” He either has one or he doesn’t.
But the contradiction crammed into a single sentence doesn’t matter to Viser because his point isn’t to make sense. It’s to make Biden’s alleged speech problem a strength for the president rather than a weakness exploited by his political opponent, who Viser
