Donald Trump – who has contributed more to the normalisation of ageism than anyone alive – is very upset about a New York Times article this week that collated evidence of his increasing senescence. The piece points to something made undeniable by Trump’s own birth cert: the US president, in common with every other mortal on Earth, is getting older.
The 79-year-old has taken to gently nodding off at press conferences, the lizard-like eyes rolling closed and flickering abruptly open. He has been covering livid bruising on his hand with a thick layer of foundation several shades darker than his own skin tone, the way he likes it.
He has reduced his working hours, so that he now starts his appointments after midday and finishes around 5pm. He makes fewer appearances than he did in his first term. He rambles, maybe more than usual. He has been talking about whether or not he’ll get into heaven.
Because Trump is particularly sensitive about his own mortality – and because he’s highly competitive – he can’t stop talking about the one person he is confident he can always beat on this score. In comparison to Joe Biden, who eventually couldn’t remember the names of his aides and didn’t recognise George Clooney, he’s positively fizzing with energy and virility.
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And so, long after Americans have moved on, he keeps wittering on about his predecessor. “He sleeps all the time – during the day, during the night, on the beach,” Trump said of Biden as recently as last week. “I’m not a sleeper.”
The more polls show Trump’s age as an area of concern for voters, the more bullish his declarations of vitality, and the more he sounds like a QVC commercial flogging some scientifically dubious life-extending nutritional supplement. His medical reports, he says, are exceptional, spectacular, so good that doctors can’t believe their own eyes. “Whatever they analysed,” he declared about a recent MRI, “they analysed it well, and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.”
He was predictably incensed by the New York Times article. He posted on Truth Social that “There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (“That was aced”) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now!” And then he went on to attack the reporter.
In fairness to Trump, he is not in terrible shape for a man of 79 who makes a point of not looking after himself. Although he has lost some weight – around the same time he started extolling the benefits of Ozempic, as it happens – he is an adherent of a crackpot theory (he may even have invented it) which maintains that humans are like non-renewable batteries and have a finite supply of built-in energy. He believes that exercise, in contravention of science and all human experience, is a waste of it. And so, even on the golf course, he takes a buggy between holes.
It is not ageist for a news outlet to ask whether a political leader approaching 80 is showing signs of slowing down. That is the kind of journalism the US media should have done a lot more of when Biden’s campaign was careening towards its car-crash ending – and perhaps they are determined to make up for it now.
But the evidence – or at least the evidence cited in that NYT article – that Trump has reached, or is rapidly approaching, the stage when he will be too old for office is not very compelling. Dozing off during tedious meetings – who hasn’t done that? Skin that bruises more easily – well, that is hardly a debilitating handicap. He may only work midday to 5pm, but he packs a lot in. And “Trump rambles more than usual” is a bit like claiming the rain is wetter than usual.
Age is a measure of whether someone is fit for office but it’s just one measure. People, after all, age at different rates. Nancy Pelosi recently announced her retirement at 85, her reputation as one of the most consequential speakers in US history fully intact. Former president Michael D Higgins, at 84, is more physically frail than he was but intellectually ferocious as ever. And – when you look at some of Maga’s bright young things being touted as Trump’s successor, like JD Vance or Donald Trump jnr – the potential to lay waste to a once-great democracy doesn’t seem to have much correlation to the date on your birth cert.
[ Kathy Sheridan: US media must stop ‘sanewashing’ Trump’s deranged speechesOpens in new window ]
There are so many legitimate grounds on which to go after Trump – they include, in no particular order, his incompetence, his authoritarianism, his weird relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his crude misogyny, his debasing of the office of president, his naked grifting, his pussy-grabbing boasts, the civil judgment that he sexually abused E Jean Carroll, his emboldening of a genocidal Israel, his xenophobia, his raging narcissism, his determination to steal the election and so on and so on – homing in on his age feels beside the point.
Trump has normalised bullying and personal attacks on his enemies – he made playground insults and crude, personal jibes an unremarkable part of the political discourse in the United States and a form of entertainment. He mocked Biden relentlessly for being too old; there is, perhaps, a certain poetic justice to the idea that it is now becoming acceptable to level the same charge at Trump.
But we should resist the impulse: ageism is the one “ism” that pits us against our future selves. The only way to definitively escape it is to die young. Of all the very many grounds on which to question Trump’s suitability for office, it is the one he himself would land on – and for that reason alone, we should avoid it.
