Presidential Power Has Its Limits, the Psalms Remind

In Biden’s decline, a caution for Trump and his admirers, too

For a memorial service at my 30th college reunion, I volunteered to participate by reading a Jewish prayer. 

The role turned out to include some flexibility to choose the text. I selected some passages from the Psalms stressing the transience of life. These verses are often used in synagogues as an introduction to Yizkor, a memorial prayer recited on four Jewish holidays each year.

They include Psalm 144:3-4: “Lord, what is Adam that you know him, or a son of a human that you think of him? Adam is like a breath, his days are like a shadow that passes.” And Psalm 90:6: “In the morning it flourishes and grows, in the evening it is cut and withers.”

I thought of the words again recently while contemplating President Biden’s apparent decline, which was so visible in the CNN debate, and again yesterday when he called Vice President Harris Vice President Trump and President Zelensky President Putin.

The human condition is such that nobody lives forever.

In the case of the president of the United States, that may seem paradoxical. By the standards of human history and contemporary geopolitics, he wields awesome powers: chief executive of the government of the world’s biggest economy, commander in chief of the world’s mightiest military. Wherever he goes, the nuclear launch codes are standing by, along with the Secret Service, access to the best possible medical care, military helicopters, Air Force One.

Yet all the financial and military power in this world can’t accomplish some things, including reversing the inexorable effects of aging or disease on Biden.

Even the most vigorous, energetic, and young president is, like all of us, only a human. That means powers that are limited, not only by the Constitution, but by science or God’s plan or both, depending on how you look at it.

For a president who embodies a country of limitless possibilities to have, at the same time, human frailties creates an inherent tension. Partisans typically acknowledge this only lopsidedly, especially when elections are approaching. Biden’s fans think Trump is mentally unstable and overweight. Trump’s fans think Biden is unsteady on his feet and approaching senility to the point of desperately needing a nap or a nursing home. Each side tends to believe its own guy is in peak condition.

Tens of millions of people are looking to a president as a heroic quasi-deity to save America from whatever peril is presenting itself at the moment—a financial crisis, a pandemic, terrorism, a flood of illegal immigration, inflation, anti-Israel riots, anti-police riots, anti-Congressional riots, the prospect of a second Trump administration, the prospect of a second Biden administration.

It’s easy for the leader and for the people to forget that the president faces lots of constraints. Those constraints include not only the intractability of the world’s problems and the checks and balances designed into the Constitution, but the reality of being human. That reality includes aging, getting sick, and, eventually, inescapably, death.

That’s true not only of elderly politicians but even younger ones, who may suffer from undisclosed illnesses or be felled by an assassin’s bullet.

The verses from the Psalms offer a more humbling message, a counterweight to the temptations of arrogance for politicians or of idolatry for voters: We’re all headed toward the evening. 

All the more reason for voters to reserve their own reverence not for mortals but for institutions, principles, and the Almighty.

Or, as another verse I read at the memorial service, Psalm 90:12, puts it, “Teach us to number our days rightly, and we will get a heart of wisdom.”

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