Why is Obama Still Ghosting Biden?

Featuring fanfic for those fixated on 44 finding more ferocity

Scene from ‘The Adventures of Barry & Joe,’ written by Adam Reid and featuring multiple artists. | Illustration by LaSpina and Court Jones

Barack Obama has published “some” of his summer reading list and for Pete’s sake: we sorely do not need, in a campaign year, an elegant, single-malt reading list from the greatest campaigner the Democratic Party has ever known. 

But there it is. Books with titles like All the Sinners Bleed and What Napoleon Could Not Do. Authors of various races and genders, with plenty of white men and without too many women’s names as to seem as though balance has been forced. It’s a syllabus that says: You are not Barack Obama. You are not curious enough, literate enough, leisured enough, non-digital enough, or focused enough to get through these diverse nine books in the remaining six weeks of summer. And here comes Obama on Twitter asking the hivemind what to read next. 

Sorry to this man but no one has as disciplined and sophisticated and chic a mind as he does! 

It’s been seven years—June 2016—since the psychologist Dan McAdams published a piece about the mind of Donald Trump, before he was elected president. He cited the personality traits known as the Big Five. These are Extroversion, which includes gregariousness, social dominance, enthusiasm, and reward-seeking. Neuroticism, which is anxiety, emotional instability, depressive tendencies, and negative emotions. Conscientiousness, meaning industriousness, discipline, rule abidance, organization. Agreeableness, which is warmth, care for others, altruism, compassion, modesty. And finally Openness, including curiosity, unconventionality, imagination, receptivity to new ideas.

I have no idea if these Big Five have any more explanatory power than bodily humors or the zodiac, and McAdams used them to include mostly what any dog could tell you about Trump: that he’s an asshole.