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Reason #11: Age
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
When is a candidate too old to be president? As with almost any question, it depends.
There are two important considerations. The first is anticipated life span. The second is cognitive function.
The chance that a president will die in office poses a succession crisis. Accordingly, it is probably unwise to elect a president with a high chance of dying during his term. This possibility affected both President Biden and Donald Trump. The average lifespan, the age at which 50% of those born on your birthday have already died, is below 78 years at present.
But the average lifespan is conditional on survival, meaning that the average person who has reached age 78 will live an additional 7 years. There is thus still a substantial risk that either candidate, if elected, would die in office.
The second consideration is more complicated. When is cognitive function too poor for a man or woman to do the work required of a U.S. president effectively? Perhaps the most relevant example from presidential history is Woodrow Wilson, who was 63 years old when his health and cognitive function began to deteriorate rapidly, after a bout of influenza at the peace talks in Paris and a series of strokes. This, combined with a stubborn, inflexible character led him to refuse compromise solutions with a Republican Senate, resulting in U.S. foreign policy decision against participation in the League of Nations. U.S. participation might have favorably changed the course of world history.
An eerily comparable situation existed in Russia, where Lenin, 16 years younger than Wilson, was also incapacitated by a series of strokes and was unable to direct his successor. Stalin won that power grab and tens of millions died as a consequence. Ironically, Lenin was paralyzed on the right side, Wilson on the left.
Joseph Biden, albeit under enormous pressure, has rendered the question of age moot by announcing his decision to drop out of the 2024 election. The question remains highly relevant in the case of Donald Trump, who, if elected, would be one year older than President Biden at the time of his 2020 election, and accordingly the oldest man to ever assume the presidency. This forces Republicans to answer the exact questions of age-competency that they leveled at Biden.
Despite a poor cognitive performance during the debate, Biden continues to show admirable performance in public and professional competence in the office of the presidency that he has served so ably.
At age 78, Donald Trump has already begun to display cognitive function issues similar to those that raised concern in Joseph Biden i.e. public lapses in concentration, garbled vocal expression and mixing up the names of political figures. This may not be unexpected. Cognitive function declines with age. Memory recall is no longer lightning fast. There may be a delay in recalling that name, that word. Recent memory is affected more prominently. In most cases, this is merely normal aging. But in some, recent memory loss is a tragic harbinger of the rapid pathological loss of cognition represented by Alzheimer’s or other form of organic dementia.
It is important to understand that competence is strongly affected by other factors. In the case of Donald Trump, his troubling character flaws and disordered personality frequently resulted in outlandish and harmful public behavior during his presidency. His current performance suggests strongly that his behavior would be substantially worse, if reelected.
If critics of President Biden are correct in advising that he is too old for reelection, then similarly, Donald Trump is too old to be elected president of the U.S..
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
July 27, 2024