Opinion: I Miss When Joe Biden Would Pat Me On The Back And Call Me Sport

Presidents come and go, but some forms of leadership stay with you. For me, that leadership was the firm little thump Joe Biden used to give me between the shoulder blades before calling me “sport” and telling me I was doing one hell of a job out there, even when I was just standing near the self-checkout at CVS.

I know politics is divisive. I know Americans have strong feelings about taxes, borders, inflation, infrastructure, and whether every public building should contain a portrait of a man looking like he just won a small-claims case. Fine. I am speaking only as one citizen who used to feel seen by the President of the United States appearing behind me at unexpected moments and asking if I was keeping my nose clean.

You do not see Donald Trump doing that anymore.

During the Biden years, there was a texture to public life. I would be halfway through pumping gas when an aviator-shadow would fall across the nozzle. “Attaboy, sport,” he would say, giving me a pat that somehow contained Amtrak, Scranton, and the exact emotional temperature of a Little League coach whose son has just grounded out but hustled to first.

Was it normal? Maybe not. Was it policy? Almost certainly no. But leadership is not always a bill signing or a foreign summit. Sometimes leadership is an 82-year-old man placing one hand on your shoulder outside a Kohl’s and saying, “You’re the real deal, kid,” before walking directly into a decorative planter.

I am not saying President Trump has to become Joe Biden. That would be unfair to everyone involved, including the Secret Service agent assigned to explain why the president has suddenly started carrying Werther’s Originals in both suit pockets. But would it kill him to occasionally walk up behind an average American, give them a reassuring pat, and call them “champ” in a way that suggests the country is complicated but your effort has been noticed?

Instead, we get speeches, press conferences, executive orders, and a general sense that if Trump ever did pat me on the back, it would be part of a much longer sentence about how strong my back is, maybe the strongest back, people are saying it.

“Modern presidents have lost touch with the small rituals of national encouragement,” said Leonard Pask, deputy director of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Familiarity. “Franklin Roosevelt had fireside chats. Ronald Reagan had the comforting smile. Biden had the ability to make a grown man feel like he had just helped his grandfather successfully reset the router.”

Pask added that Trump’s style is “less pat-on-the-back, more point-at-you-from-a-distance-while-describing-a-hotel-lobby.”

And look, I understand the country has bigger problems. I do. There are wars, court cases, supply chain issues, weird eggs, and at least one senator at any given moment using the phrase “the American people” like he has personally met all of us at a barbecue. But a nation is not held together by institutions alone. It is held together by small, stupid gestures that make citizens feel briefly like they are 11 years old and about to be told they played a heck of a game.

I did not agree with Biden on everything. Sometimes I did not even agree with him on where he appeared to be walking. But when that hand landed on my back and he called me sport, I felt there was still an adult somewhere in the building, even if that adult had wandered into the coatroom and begun telling a lampshade about Delaware.

Maybe that is gone now. Maybe this is simply the price of change. Every administration brings its own tone, its own priorities, its own way of making a person feel either comforted, alarmed, or like they have accidentally wandered into the VIP section of a golf club they cannot afford.

Still, I miss it.

One thing is for certain: I did not know what I had until the hand was gone, and now every back pat from my dentist feels like a constitutional downgrade.