WHITE HOUSE INTERPRETERS FIND IT IMMENSELY DIFFICULT TO MAKE SENSE OF PRESIDENT BIDEN'S NONSENSE.

Last week was a tough week for the White House American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. News broke that President Biden's first ASL interpreter, Heather Mewshaw, manages a group of ASL interpreters called, Hands of Liberty (formally known as Right Side ASL), which provide translations for videos that embrace right-wing ideals, including some that peddled baseless election claims and vaccine misinformation. Needless to say, we haven't seen Ms Mewshaw since.

Then, as President Biden delivered remarks on America's fight to contain the COVID-19 Pandemic, it was clear that his new interpreter was having a very difficult time making sense of his nonsense.

"Our ALS interpreters are usually very quick on their toes", said Howard Rosenblum CEO of the National Association of the Deaf. "They have to be. Imagine taking people's words and then translating them into hand gestures. It's not an easy task."

And that task becomes exponentially more difficult when President Biden takes to the podium. Whether he's babbling incoherently or ad-libbing with his politically incorrect (and often racist) gibberish, the role of the ASL interpreter becomes increasingly more difficult.

"Unless you've tried to make sense of pointless blathering, you really wouldn't understand how difficult this job is", said Stacy Johnson, a Biden ASL interpreter. "President Obama was really the standard bearer. He never went off script. He used his teleprompter flawlessly and in the words of Joe Biden, he was 'the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy'. All of this really made our job pretty easy."

Then, when President Trump took office, things changed. Not so much in his inability to articulate his points, but rather in his approach to doing so. 

"President Trump would very seldom used the teleprompter. He always liked to shoot from the hip and would often speak in hyperbole and incomplete sentences", said Johnson. "But in some ways, he stuck to the script in the sense that he always made the successes about himself and the failures about the democrats, so in a way we knew what was coming and there was a pattern of expectation that we eventually came to rely on."

Enter President Biden, who at 78 years of age is just a shell of his former self. "We really have no idea what he's going to say", said Johnson. "Not because there isn't a prepared speech for him to read from. There always is! And Lord knows his handlers are hoping and praying that he'll stay on script. The biggest issue we face with President Biden is that he actually has no idea who he is, what he's doing, or why he is where he is half of the time. It's always a bit of a crapshoot. Rolling the dice and you get what you get. That makes our job difficult and we usually do a lot of intentional misinterpretation, so that a clear message is getting out to the American people in some form or fashion."

This seems to be the approach most ASL interpreters are taking with President Biden. While under Trump's White House, many progressive-leaning interpreters would take liberties with Trump's words in order to help paint him as a racist, a xenophobe, or just a guy who is really, really bad for America. However, with President Biden the issue is trying to help paint the President as coherent, lucid, and intelligible. 

"It's up to us to ensure Americans have confidence in their President", said Johnson. "If the American people knew how bad of shape President Biden is really in, it could cause irreparable damage to the image the White House is trying to portray. Americans need to believe their President is of sound mind and sound judgement, even when he clearly is not, and our role is less about interpreting and more about helping shape a narrative that all is well and our nation is in good and capable hands."

Needless to say, these ASL interpreters have their hands full as things are expected to get worse, not better, until Biden's work--undoing of American democracy--is complete; at which point the 25th Amendment will be enacted and the reign of Supreme Chancellor Harris can finally commence. Until then, we can be certain that America's last President, Joe Biden, is going to keep things interesting for folks like Stacy Johnson.

"There's never a dull moment", said Johnson. "And that makes my job interesting and fun."