80-year-old US President Joe Biden became the butt of a Saturday Night Live joke during the show’s weekend update.
Over a headline about Biden signing legislation to avert a railway strike, but without guaranteeing rail workers' sick leave demands, the co-anchor, Michael Che, quipped:
“How do you expect him to care about sick leave when he shows up to work every day with full blown CTE?”
The host was referencing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - a progressive brain condition. Its symptoms vary, but overall tend to be similar to those of other types of degenerative brain conditions, like Alzheimer's disease. Affecting the functioning of the brain, the symptoms, which include short-term memory loss, mood swings, increasing confusion, and disorientation, eventually lead to dementia, according to medical studies.
On December 2, Joe Biden signed a congressional resolution that effectively forced rail employees back to work without any of the paid sick leave provisions that were central to the negotiations.
"The bill I’m about to sign ends a difficult rail dispute and helps our nation avoid what, without a doubt, would have been an economic catastrophe at a very bad time in the calendar,” Biden said Friday morning.
After months of negotiations, the rail workers and train operators struck a tentative agreement in September, but further talks stalled, raising the specter of a looming strike. The Association of American Railroads (AAR) refused to guarantee paid sick leave for staff.
As the US struggles with with rampant inflation and chronic supply chain problems, POTUS sought to ward off the threat of walkouts over the Christmas season.
In line with the signed legislation, new contracts will provide rail workers with a 24% pay increase over a period of five years through 2024, extra paid time off, and immediate payouts averaging $11,000. However, it allows employees to miss work for routine medical appointments just three times a year, forcing them to use paid vacation time to do so.
While the White House said that Biden was “reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement” but was compelled to act to protect US economic interests, many of the rail workers and union leaders subsequently said they felt they had been betrayed by the Democratic president and his party.
As to the SNL joke at Joe Biden's expense, from disorientation to forgetting names and places, America’s oldest sitting president is a meme-gift that keeps on giving, constantly raising eyebrows with his off-color verbal blunders, confused ramblings, and occasional downright forays into fiction.
Despite voters increasingly questioning his mental and physical ability to carry out his duties, the Democrat has, nevertheless, indicated he “intends” to run for office again in 2024. In the recent midterm elections, held on November 8, national exit polling revealed that 67 percent of the voters are against another Joe Biden run for the Oval Office, while close to 40 percent of those people were self-identified Democrats.