Defenders of President Joe Biden, who was recently found by his own Department of Justice’s special counsel to be too feebleminded to stand trial for illegally retaining classified documents, have an excuse for their guy. It’s not that the oldest individual ever to hold the office of the presidency is personally unequal to the task. No, he just has a stutter! Not only is it not an issue, you are a bad person who is mean to people with speech disabilities for thinking it is.
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The president’s campaign recently claimed on X that former President and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, in mocking Biden’s delivery of his State of the Union address, was actually mocking Biden’s “lifelong” stutter. The Washington Post and other liberal media outlets dutifully repeated those marching orders. One self-described “stuttering advocate” told Politico “she worries that Trump’s behavior could ‘normalize’ insults directed at people with speech impediments,” adding “many advocates are hopeful Trump’s mockery will inspire Biden to have an open conversation about stuttering, which advocates estimate affects 3 million people nationwide.”
There’s just one problem, though: the narrative is all bullshit.
I don’t remember when I first realized that I stuttered. Researchers aren’t sure exactly what causes it, but neurogenic and hereditary factors both seem to play a role. The first clear sign that something was off was when I began being pulled out of class for speech therapy in kindergarten. Stuttering, for most people, is a childhood disability. Research indicates around three-quarters of children who stutter at age 7 will grow out of it by their early teens. Some are not quite so fortunate.
It’s hard to put into words (no pun intended) what it’s like to stutter, in part because I haven’t known anything else. Trying to speak can be daunting. Usually you can tell a few words or even sentences out when a sound is going to cause a “block.” When that happens, the sound gets caught in your throat like a Chinese finger trap. There are a few options at that point: You can try and force your way through the block, you can “run around” the word by substituting in a synonym to avoid the block, or you can stop and try to work through the sound from a different angle. What are perfectly mundane interactions for most people, like ordering food for giving an introduction, become exercises in frustration and anxiety.
My peers in school certainly took notice. One friend of mine jabbed cruelly, although not without some humor, that I had “lag.” Eventually I insisted on dropping the speech therapy. By then, I was nearly in high school, and it hadn’t done me any good — and had the side effect of conspicuously removing me from my compatriots. I figured that if I forgot what I was, the rest of the world would as well and we could all move on. But reality has ways, subtle and otherwise, of reminding you of its existence.
There’s a look you learn to recognize after a while, usually manifesting when you’re about two sentences into meeting somebody. It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the human face is worth infinitely more. And the story it tells, or rather the question it poses, is unmistakable: What is wrong with you? I often wondered the same thing. Eloquence does not come naturally to most people, but mere speech is another matter.
It must be said that there are people with far more severe stutters than myself. It may take a little bit longer, but I can usually carry on a conversation just fine. Often on a good day, I can get off several fluent-sounding sentences in a row, and somebody meeting me for the first time might be none the wiser. On really good days, I can even fool myself.
To live with a stutter is to live with a temptation to self-isolation from and resentment toward creation. It is to be human with the nagging feeling that one cannot participate fully in humanity; after all, what are we if not language and communication?
For all of those reasons, I cannot think of anything more insulting or damaging toward people who stutter than a media campaign by Biden and his allies to try and deny what the vast majority of Americans can see for themselves. Trump’s comments, properly understood, should only ‘normalize’ insults directed at enfeebled presidents who are unable to execute their duties. That is to say, Biden’s problem is obviously not because of stuttering.
It’s quite strange that Biden’s “stutter” wasn’t apparent until he began seeking to be the oldest president in American history.
While Joe Biden has always been a pathological fabulist with a commitment to integrity comparable to now-former Harvard President Claudine Gay, he used to be a rather good speaker. Having held public office for over one-fifth of American history, there is ample footage of him through his career in the United States Senate, and later as vice president under President Barack Obama. None of it gives any indication that Biden didn’t grow out of his childhood stutter as he grew older, as happens in most cases.
The oldest Biden speech I could find on C-SPAN is from 1983, starting just over 46 minutes in. There is no hint of a stutter. Listening to Biden’s overseeing of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court in 1991 yields the same result. The vice presidential debate in 2008 against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin? Nope. Especially not in the 2012 vice presidential debate against Paul Ryan either, where Biden’s verbal badgering of his opponent helped stabilize the Obama campaign following a disastrous debate against Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Compare that to my interview with former Rep. Dan Lipinski in 2022. If Biden truly has been hamstrung by a lifelong stutter that explains his current verbal ineloquence, it’s quite strange that it wasn’t apparent until he began seeking to be the oldest president in American history.
Something that would irreversibly harm Americans who stutter, more than the Donald Trump of Democrats’ fever dreams ever could, is a false association with Joe Biden’s presidency. I cannot think of something more damaging to a group of people struggling for normalcy and acceptance than to be associated with a campaign of a career politician desperately attempting to deflect from his unfitness for office. The cause of his problems, rather than any residual speech impediment, is likely the one that the vast majority of Americans, including many who despise Trump, can see with their own eyes.
Life may not be fair, but it does work in mysterious ways. Never much good with the spoken word, I took an interest in the written one. As you may have noticed, my current job involves quite a few written words, 1,131 of them being in this piece. No thanks to those on the left who would weaponize stuttering for their own ends, it goes without saying.
Follow Stephan Kapustka on X at @StephanKapustka.