Age

After being gaslit into believing President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities were up to par, some are licking their wounds by questioning the mental fitness and age of former president Donald Trump. Now that Biden is out of the race, Donald Trump is the oldest presidential nominee in US history. “Trump, a seventy-eight-year-old with a history of heart disease and obesity, according to experts, has not shared any updated bloodwork results or other specific information during this campaign to help experts assess his ongoing medical risks,” Cockburn read Monday in the Washington Post. Think of it — an obese president! Cue the fat shamers.

I’ve written ad nauseam about how much I hate this election, about how Trump-Biden 2.0 is even more demoralizing than the first season of our never-ending reality show, Electile Dysfunction: America Has Gone Soft. “For me, the prospect of a Trump-Biden rerun makes me so disillusioned about politics that I find myself wanting to sit this election cycle out completely,” I wrote last October. Those feelings have only intensified since. Trump is now a Convicted Felon™, with more cases pending. He will likely be in court for the rest of his life. Hunter Biden, who has no problem with ED despite the heaps of cocaine he was on, is also a Convicted Felon™. Biden is, well, Biden. We are ruled by criminals and Olds.

The Democrats are not just caught between one dog and one hydrant. They are caught between three — and the water is coming down hard on their legs.  The first dog, obviously, is the president’s physical and mental condition and his status as the presumptive nominee who won near-unanimous support in the primaries and secured enough votes to win the nomination on the first ballot. Those victories leave Biden alone in charge of staying in the race. Others can pressure him, offer him carrots and sticks, but Biden and his family control the decision.  The second dog is Biden’s nearly impossible battle to recover public trust after his disastrous debate against Donald Trump. Voters simply don’t buy the White House explanation that it was “one bad night.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.  “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”  Those were Hemingway’s words in 1926's The Sun Also Rises.   A century later, they apply to Joe Biden, not financially but politically. For him, the sun is not rising. It’s setting.   “Gradually and then suddenly” is the story of Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline. “Gradually and then suddenly” is how his army of enablers in the media, the Democratic Party and the donor base abandoned his defense.

Tonight America’s oldest president takes on his loose cannon predecessor in the first presidential debate in Atlanta. Presidents Biden and Trump have faced waves of speculation regarding their respective mental conditions — and whether or not each is fit to hold office. Given their ages and stages, Biden and Trump have been accused of suffering from cognitive decline, dementia or Alzheimer’s. And this evening, both candidates’ mental states will be on full display for millions of Americans to closely watch and scrutinize. Will the two even make it through the ninety-minute debate without shouting at each other and endless rambling? The odds are low.

President Joe Biden spoke in Normandy on the eightieth anniversary of D-Day Thursday — and only slightly made a fool of himself. As he entered the event, it looked as if he entirely missed where he was supposed to sit, but played it off with a nice salute to a veteran. In the middle of a rousing speech, he talked about how many Russians died in Ukraine... for mysterious reasons. He did a bit of a squat in an invisible chair as the speaker Lloyd J. Austin III was introduced. The debacle ended with Dr. Jill Biden leading Joe away as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, nimbly ran to greet D-Day veterans. And we can’t forget Biden’s subtle double fist pump after the jets flew over the ceremony.

Yesterday was a year’s worth of a rising wave that came crashing down on Democratic hopes for 2024. They had hoped Republicans, motivated in part by constant lawfare attacks, would nominate Donald Trump — only to tear their party apart during the summer as denial of election eligibility in key states made clear he had no path to victory. They had hoped that by carefully managing Joe Biden, with access even more locked down than during the height of the pandemic, would survive questions of age and infirmity. And they had assumed the special counsel's report, while sure to include some damning equivalence with Trump’s stacks of Mar-a-Lago memorabilia, would be a story for a news cycle, easily survived and ultimately unmemorable.

President Joe Biden surprised the American people Thursday night by delivering previously unscheduled remarks on his classified documents scandal — and promptly created an unmitigated PR disaster. Earlier in the day, the special counsel investigating Biden’s improper retention and storage of classified documents issued his report. Robert Hur found the president did mishandle documents, broke national security law and undermined national security by releasing classified information to his ghostwriter. However, perhaps even more damning, Hur declined to recommend charges against the president, asserting that he presents as a “well-meaning” elderly man with a poor memory.

As another Trump presidency starts to look more likely, the incessant conversations about age are bubbling back up. Roundtable discussions about “cognitive capabilities” took a hiatus over the last few years in the mainstream press, as a slow-jogging, hair-sniffing, Joe Biden restored normalcy to the White House. Normalcy, for those who haven’t been paying attention, looks like said octogenarian falling up the stairs of Air Force One, falling asleep at COP26, forgetting the names of his own cabinet members and of course, being escorted around the White House lawn by the Easter Bunny.