It’s not time to be alarmed about Trump’s age. But as Yogi Berra once said, it gets late early here.
Is it time to start being seriously worried about Donald Trump’s age? To listen to the Resistance types on the left, Trump has both feet in the grave, is simply nailed to his perch, and shows on a daily basis that we would be better off with 83-year-old cancer-ravaged Joe Biden. To listen to MAGA, he’s a man of unrivaled vigor in American history. The truth lies somewhere in between. I’m not in a panic over Trump’s age-related decline, which is far from reaching a critical stage. And no serious person should let Democratic partisans use the issue to whitewash the appalling extent to which Biden was allowed not only to decay in office while the press and partisans covered for him, but even to pretend with the connivance of those same people that it was at all appropriate to present Biden to the American public for reelection. That said, Trump is showing signs of decline, and they are best understood as a different type of aging than Biden. If Trump’s age and health are not yet critical, we should bear in mind as he approaches his 80th birthday in June (a few weeks before the nation’s 250th) that Trump is at an age when things can get worse in a hurry.
There are many ways in which Trump remains vigorous, sometimes too vigorous. He tweets at all hours, more often these days at Castro-esque length. He has bent the federal executive branch to his will to an extraordinary extent, and (with a few exceptions, such as handing over HHS to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) has done so with his unmistakable personal stamp, from his unique rhetorical style to his very personal vendettas. Where Biden had to be shielded from reporters and given carefully pre-screened questions so he could offer scripted answers, Trump banters regularly with the traveling press corps, not infrequently browbeating or threatening unfriendly reporters. His Wednesday night speech showed how forceful he can be, even in the evenings, when Biden struggled. He has the urgency of a man who narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet last summer and knows that time is shortening.
But Father Time remains undefeated. Trump was five months older when inaugurated than Biden, and like Biden, older on his first day than Ronald Reagan was on his last. He’ll be the second president to turn 80 in office; only twelve presidents have even lived that long, and just eight lived to be 84. Only one of those (Reagan) served two terms. Athletically built and trim into his forties, Trump is overweight and has a famously terrible diet. Of course, there’s more that goes into longevity: Trump’s parents lived to ripe old ages, and unlike Biden (who declined visibly in office, despite remaining trim and taking good care of himself), Trump didn’t have life-altering open-air brain surgery in his forties. But Trump had to scale back his public appearances during the 2023-24 primary campaign in order to remain fresh for the fall general election. He also seemed rattled and off his game in August and into September 2024 after being shot. His convention speech started off subdued — it was the most emotionally compelling Trump I can recall — and then rambled on interminably after the strong first 15 minutes.
A November 25 New York Times article by Katie Rogers and “machine-learning engineer” Dylan Freedman kicked off the latest round of calls for the 25th Amendment and other anti-Trump hyperbole. They noted that his public appearances are less frequent and often between noon and 5 p.m.; that he closes his eyes and seems to doze off at times in public meetings; that he has been less than forthcoming about a recent MRI and various bruises and other physical marks; and that he has been doing less domestic travel than in 2017 (albeit offset by more foreign travel and explained in part by not needing to seek reelection).
Of course, critics have been quick to recast as age issues problems that speak more to Trump’s character, temperament, and base of knowledge than his age. In fact, as both Jim Geraghty and Jeff Blehar have detailed, we should be worried less that Trump will prove too somnolent to supervise his subordinates than that advancing age will strip Trump of his already-limited verbal filter and emotional and moral restraints. A Trump who is too forceful with age is a more seriously concerning prospect than one who simply replays the Biden experience. Biden’s decline was obvious, visible to the ordinary citizen, and plainly manifested in contrast to his appearance and demeanor a few years earlier; Trump’s is apt to be insidiously gradual and hard to untangle from his preexisting flaws.
This is more troubling than during Trump’s first term because the vice president is not just a divisive factional figure; he’s also unready. JD Vance, who turned 41 in August, is still younger than anyone ever to hold the office of president (Teddy Roosevelt was almost 43). More to the point, Vance has never run anything remotely comparable in scale to the federal executive branch, and before becoming VP, he had spent only two years in public office, as a backbench Senator.
It’s not time to be alarmed about Trump’s age. But as Yogi Berra once said, it gets late early here.