America's biggest issue: Our elderly egomaniac is better than your elderly egomaniac

I’ve been bored with the Donald Trump Show Trials, but this unexpected faux pas by the Biden Administration is amusing. From the New York Times:

President Biden’s campaign, after more than a year of studiously avoiding direct comments about Donald J. Trump’s legal problems, on Tuesday dispatched the actor Robert De Niro to the Manhattan courthouse where the former president’s first criminal trial is wrapping up.

Mr. De Niro — in an off-script moment — declared that Mr. Trump was guilty and should go to jail.

“The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, whatever it is, he is guilty, and we all know it,” the actor said after the news conference, as a rowdy group of Trump supporters confronted him and yelled insults before he left. …

The Trump campaign quickly jumped on the Biden news conference, and Mr. Trump shared a video on social media of Mr. De Niro yelling at protesters.

“The Biden folks have finally done it,” said Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign. “After months of saying that politics had nothing to do with this trial, they showed up and made it with a campaign event.”

He characterized Mr. De Niro’s involvement as a desperate reach for a campaign that needed to lift Mr. Biden’s poll numbers, referring to him as a “washed-up actor” and arguing that Biden campaign staff members at the news conference had sensed it was a bad idea to stand in the proverbial shadow of the courthouse.

Do you ever get the impression that much as everybody likes to complain about Baby Boomers, America’s highest generational priority ought to be to put Greatest Generation guys like Biden (b. 1942), De Niro (b. 1943) and Trump (born in 1946, so technically a Boomer, but still …) out to pasture. I guess I’m not partisan enough, but these three strike me as having more in common — they are all elderly egomaniacs — than the “D” or “R” associated with their names makes some vastly better than another.

If you are a Democrat you are supposed to obsess over Trump being an elderly EGOMANIAC, while if you are a Republican, you are supposed to be worked up over Biden being an ELDERLY egomaniac.

But adding De Niro to the mix reminds me of an amusing connection between Trump and De Niro: A couple of decades ago, they were each one of a handful of celebrities to have a concealed-carry permit to pack a pistol on the streets of New York. As I wrote in 2013:

New York City has had strict gun-control laws for about a century. (Celebrities, the rich, and the politically connected, however, can often score an NYC concealed-carry permit. A 2002 Newsday article reported that private citizens licensed to pack heat on the streets of Manhattan included Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Howard Stern, Donald Trump, Steven Seagal, William F. Buckley, Chazz Palminteri, Winthrop Rockefeller, Don Imus, and Buddy Hackett.)

I’m sure these guys probably had a variety of partisan affiliations, but once you see this list, you can’t unsee the commonalities.