U.S. President Joe Biden bowed out of the 2024 election on Sunday amid mounting pressure over his age and mental fitness. Now that he has exited the race, former president Donald Trump may see those exact same criticisms slung at him as attention turns to his own cognitive ability and past gaffes.
Trump, 78, is the oldest nominee for president in U.S. history, a title he’s likely to maintain once Democrats eventually choose their own nominee.
Biden has endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the party in the upcoming election but her nomination is not yet guaranteed. The decision is set to be made at the Democratic National Convention, slated for Aug. 19-22.
Harris, 59, is the only Democrat so far vying for the nomination, but other leading Democrats might try to give her a run for her money. In bad news for Trump, all of the politicians who could stand a chance at challenging Harris are younger than him, by a lot. In fact, most are younger than Harris, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom (56), Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (52) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (51).
If Trump wins the election and assumes office on Jan 20, 2025, he will overtake Biden as the oldest sitting U.S. president in history — albeit by a small margin of five months.
Harris’ relative youth could be a huge bonus for the Democratic party. Instead of being on the defensive on the question of age, Democrats have the chance to turn the tables and leverage the same attacks Trump launched at Biden.
Is Trump too old to serve?
In January, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley made a prophetic statement while campaigning against Trump in the GOP primary.
“Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump,” Haley said at the rally. “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.”
The resurfaced clip is gaining traction online in the wake of Biden’s exit.
Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his re-election campaign made no mention of age, but his withdrawal from the race came at a time when Democratic donors, party elites and U.S. voters alike loudly questioned if Biden was too old to serve another term.
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The concerns were ignited after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump, during which he stumbled over his words and appeared confused multiple times. But Trump, too, has made some embarrassing blunders on the campaign trail over the years and he hasn’t escaped questions about his mental fitness.
A recent Ipsos survey conducted for ABC News and the Washington Post found that 60 per cent of Americans believe Trump is too old for a second term.
During Trump’s first term, he was already fielding questions about his cognitive abilities. In 2018, Michael Wolff published his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which included quotes from a number of Trump’s aides, who expressed doubts about his competence. Trump denied the allegations that he wasn’t fit for office and allowed his doctor to reveal that he had undergone a cognitive assessment and scored a perfect 30 out of 30.
Trump has continued to reference this assessment to boast about his mental acuity. (It’s important to note that the test is not designed to measure intelligence, but to screen for neurodegenerative disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s.)
Just last month, Trump again referenced the assessment and suggested that Biden should be compelled to take a cognitive test, only to confuse the doctor who administered the test to him in the next sentence.
“He doesn’t even know what the word ‘inflation’ means. I think he should take a cognitive test like I did,” Trump said at the speech in June. “Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately.”
The person Trump was referring to is actually Rep. Ronny Jackson, who was the White House physician for part of his presidency.
In another recent gaffe, Trump referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “Nikki Haley” numerous times while talking about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Pelosi shot back by claiming that Trump has a “cognitive disorder.”
Over the course of several months in late 2023, Trump seemed to confuse Biden and former president Barack Obama seven times, according to Forbes — three times during a speech on Sept. 15, twice during an Oct. 11 interview with Fox News radio, once during an Oct. 1 rally and again in November.
Trump has even forgotten his own wife’s name. In February this year, he appeared to refer to his wife Melania Trump as “Mercedes.”
During Trump’s recent speech at the Republican National Convention — where he accepted the Republican nomination — the former president appeared to ramble and meander through his words.
A Bloomberg opinion piece excoriated the speech as “so somnambulant and self-absorbed that at times the convention floor felt like a seance guided by a medium speaking in tongues.”
While Democrats couldn’t fully seize on these Trump missteps while Biden was campaigning, the floodgates may now be wide open to attack Trump’s age.
But it’s not just U.S. presidents who getting up there in age. The 118th U.S. Congress under Biden is one of the oldest in U.S. history. Business Insider found that nearly one in four members of Congress are in their 70s or 80s.
The increased attention paid to the age of politicians has spurred debate on age limits. Pew polling from October 2023 found that 79 per cent of Americans support age limits for elected federal officials and 74 per cent support limits for Supreme Court justices.
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
