In a rare moment of silence on Sunday, Donald Trump stepped away from the microphone as his Las Vegas supporters spontaneously broke into a rambling version of the world’s best-known song.
“There comes a certain point where you don’t want to hear ‘Congratulations,’” the former president said when they finished. “You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.”
The day exists and it is today.
Trump is now 78 years old. It’s a time that has clearly occupied space in Trump’s mind for some time.
“Just remember what I’m telling you: 78 is not old,” Trump told a New York Post gossip columnist nearly two years ago. The improvised comment occurred during a conversation about his first wife, Ivana, on the occasion of her death at the age of 73.
The meaning of 78 is unmistakable. This is the same age that his opponent, President Joe Biden, turned shortly after winning the 2020 elections. Concerns about Biden’s fitness for office have been a constant since then, accentuated by a physical and appearance decline that Trump’s allies and his campaign happily amplified it.
However, if Trump wins, he will be the oldest president to take office at 78 years and 219 days, surpassing Biden’s previous record of 78 years and 61 days. (Biden, of course, would break his own Inauguration Day record if he were reelected.) And in the midst of his third run for the White House — for which he maintained a remarkably light travel schedule and at times appeared tired during appearances on court — Trump’s own mental acuity has faced intense scrutiny from political enemies, including Biden.
“But let’s all remember that Donald Trump is just a flatulent old man with an orange tan who fell asleep in his own judgment,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said at the Wisconsin Democratic convention last weekend.
There’s also this: For the rest of the presidential race, just three years will separate the ages of Trump, 78, and Biden, 81, on paper — a reminder that the two men are in fact from the same era. Children of Greatest Generation parents, each grew up in the aftermath of World War II, in a country forever changed by the threat of nuclear war, the proliferation of television, and the postwar American boom. They would have overlapped in high school, at least for a while. Through a combination of medical and student deferrals, both avoided serving in the Vietnam War. Both are grandfathers.
In the rematch between the two oldest presidents in history, the advanced age of the presumptive presidential candidates has been a much discussed factor. More than half of U.S. adults say they are both too old to serve another term, according to an April ABC/Ipsos poll, an increase of 10 percentage points from the previous year.
The same polls persistently show that there are more reservations about Biden’s capabilities than Trump’s — largely because Democrats are far more likely to express concerns about the incumbent’s age and physical condition than Republicans are willing to say about his. candidate himself.
Trump, however, does not appear to be a man convinced that voters see much of a difference. Instead, in his public appearances, the former president has taken pains to project his age as just a number and not as a starting point for comparing him to Biden.
“I don’t feel 77 years old,” he said during a speech at Trump Tower the morning after a Manhattan jury convicted him on 34 criminal charges. Earlier this year, Trump similarly told an interviewer: “I feel like I’m about 35 years old. In fact, I feel better now than I did 30 years ago. Tell me, is this crazy?”
At his rallies, Trump regularly mocks Biden’s cognitive abilities, and his campaign and allies share selectively edited videos of the president’s appearances to unflattering effect.
Trump, however, suffered his own gaffes and verbal slips. Earlier this year, Trump confused former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He misreported her location and once erroneously compared her polling numbers to those of former President Barack Obama, not Biden.
His Republican rivals seized on these mistakes during the primaries, hoping to convince Republican voters that the former president was a shadow of the man who first entered the political arena nine years ago. Haley called Trump “totally deranged” and “diminished” as she fought for the nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign highlighted Trump’s perceived mistakes by publishing a “Trump Accident Tracker,” while the candidate insisted that Trump “lost control of his fastball.”
“What Donald Trump does now is he’s attached to the teleprompter,” DeSantis said at one point. “He can’t get out of that teleprompter.”
Increasingly, the Biden campaign and its surrogates intensify their attacks on Trump with criticisms similar to those once made by the former president’s Republican opponents. They took a more aggressive turn after Trump’s rally in Las Vegas, where his teleprompter malfunctioned, causing the former president to improvise some of his remarks.
During one segment, Trump gave a 600-word speech about his concerns about battery-powered boats, which included an extensive debate about whether it would be better to die from a shark attack or electrocution.
“So there is a shark 10 meters from the boat, 10 meters, here,” Trump said. “Will I be electrocuted if the boat sinks, the water passes through the battery, the boat sinks? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump by the shark and not get electrocuted?”
Trump finally concluded: “I’m going to get electrocuted every time. I won’t go near the shark.”
Biden’s allies attacked social media, widely sharing the gaffe. At a private fundraiser in New York this week, Doug Emhoff told donors that Trump was incomprehensible these days.
“This is a degraded version of an already horrible person,” Emhoff said in reference to Trump’s speech in Las Vegas. “He is degrading before our eyes.”
The talk continued on the eve of Trump’s birthday, when the former president met with Congressional Republicans. In private meetings on Thursday (13) in Washington, Trump changed the subject, complaining about Taylor Swift potentially endorsing his opponent, claiming that Pelosi’s daughter said the former House speaker could have dated Trump, which a daughter he denied it and called it “disturbed”.
He offered confusing political advice about how Republicans should discuss abortion, boasted about House members who lost seats after voting to impeach him, and called the GOP convention’s host city, Milwaukee, “horrible,” spurring conflicting reports about what he meant by the Wisconsin Republicans.
Many of those present at the meetings who spoke to reporters afterward praised the fact that Trump presented himself as unified and strong. Biden’s campaign called Trump “weak” on social media when the former president ended a post-meeting news conference after five minutes without answering questions.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, in a statement to CNNresponded to the recent attacks by saying that Biden “and his struggling campaign have resorted to becoming parodies of themselves.”
But the observations about Trump’s age and mental state don’t just come from within the Biden campaign.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, who resigned as communications director in the Trump White House in December 2020, said on “The View” there are “glaring warning signs about Trump.”
“Listening to him now he doesn’t sound like he did in 2016 and he was never particularly eloquent,” said Griffin, the show’s co-host and contributor to CNN. “I’m recognizing it and seeing a decline in it. Others who knew him have said this and I think it matters.”
Notably, Trump’s allies see his age as a potential factor that could keep him out of prison following his felony conviction. Asked about the likelihood of Trump ending up behind bars, Jonathan Turley, a lawyer and professor at George Washington University Law School and a friend of the former president, said it would be “absurd.”
One of the reasons?
“He’s an elderly first-time offender,” Turley said.
However, amid ongoing questions about Trump’s longevity, he told his supporters not to worry. He has good genes.
“My father lived a long time. My mother lived a long time and they were happy and great,” Trump told the Las Vegas audience. “Then maybe we’ll live a long time.”
Share:
