With all attention focused on surviving the daily exploits of President Fox News Grandpa, there isn't much time to assess how we're going to put the pieces back together again when he's gone. Occasionally, we get a sign of how massive the task will be. It's clear now that the ceaseless work Donald Trump has done to dismantle, among other things, the norms around presidential behavior will not easily be reversed. Just take a look at Thursday's exhibition:

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Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

But wait—what did Biden do to attract the ire of our Normal Adult President? During a recent speech at the University of Miami, he threatened to beat up the president.

“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere, and she likes it,’” Biden said on Tuesday, according to ABC News. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’ ”

“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” Biden added. “I’m a pretty [darn] good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”

This is cringeworthy rhetoric from the former vice president of the United States. It is the second time Biden has mused about taking Trump behind the woodshed, but the first when the would-be victim—also a fairly old man—is the sitting president. This kind of toxic, performed masculinity is all too common in politics, but it's discouraging to see it at the highest levels of leadership. We expect little more from the president, who after all wondered whether "Second Amendment people" could find a remedy to a Hillary Clinton presidency. But Biden ought to be different.



When he first big-talked Trump, Biden began with an incisive, impassioned salvo about why the Mobile Locker Room tape was so disgusting. The next part wasn't necessary:

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It's a sign that the coarsening of our political discourse, for which Trump bears a hugely outsized responsibility, is having an effect on many of our large adult leaders. Talk of physically attacking your political enemies is not suddenly kosher because the president is crass and hateful and lacks respect, in a profound way, for other human beings. Biden and Trump won't ever actually get violent. Can we say the same about every one of their supporters?

It's also not OK just because Trump has found political success as a blustering tough guy. For all that the Democrats' "they go low, we go high" shtick has been mocked after 2016, part of the work of rebuilding our democratic culture involves refusing to thrash around in the mud with the president. The republic gets dirtier—and he likes it.

Besides, watching these grandpas flex their John Wayne one-liners is just embarrassing.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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