What if we covered Trump's age the way we covered Biden's?
His rapid decline is obvious. Why not give it the attention it deserves?
This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
Anyone with an elderly parent or grandparent has seen how it goes: With the passage of years, rest becomes a struggle, as they sleep fitfully overnight, then nod off repeatedly over the course of the day.
This is President Trump’s pattern now. He goes on social media binges until the wee hours of the morning, sending out strings of angry messages while the rest of the country slumbers. Then when he finds himself sitting in a comfortable chair while others are momentarily the center of the action — in cabinet meetings, at a basketball game, even amid the spraying sweat and blood of a UFC fight on the White House lawn — his eyes close, his chin lowers, and he grabs a few moments of blissful slumber before returning to consciousness.
Trump’s habit of making frequent brief visits to dreamland is less a problem in itself than an illustration of something deeper; in fairness, anyone who had to listen to Lee Zeldin drone on about how great they are might put their head down for a nap, too. And most of the time, Trump does appear more spry than many 80-year-olds.
But only once before has America had a president this old — and that time, we held an extended and furious debate about whether age had rendered the octogenarian unable to do his job. By comparison, discussion of Trump’s age has been quiet and infrequent.
But it’s a subject we can no longer avoid. And if we’re going to confront it, we have to distinguish what is solely a matter of appearance from the things that really matter — exactly what we didn’t do when Joe Biden was the one growing old before our eyes.
More unhinged and disinhibited than ever
We are neither psychiatrist nor gerontologists and therefore make no specific diagnosis of Trump’s mental or physical state. But we are all doing what those with aging relatives do: watching the signs of increasing mental and physical infirmity, asking what’s normal and what might require intervention, and wondering when we ought to be worried.
Some of those signs have little or no effect on his job performance, like the gruesome bruising on his hand or the swollen ankles.
Even the sleeping, one could argue, doesn’t matter all that much — it’s not as though genuine business is being conducted at those cabinet meetings and he needs to stay sharp for it.
But disinhibition is often associated with certain kinds of dementia, and Trump seems less inhibited than ever — even for someone who wasn’t particularly inhibited to begin with.
Every candidate and president makes “gaffes,” statements that when taken out of context can be used against them. But lately Trump has been making gaffes so obviously damaging that they would be too stupid for a politician on their first run for city council, let alone one who has spent a lifetime talking to reporters.
It isn’t just his increasing propensity to say inappropriate things — like asking a child “You think you could take me in a fight?” The ones that show how Trump is declining are the ones that do him deep political damage.
For example, when asked how much Americans’ financial situation played into his thinking about Iran, he responded, “Not even a little bit … I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody.”
Democrats couldn’t believe their luck.
Even if his point — that he was focused on making sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon — was legitimate, the phrasing was a remarkable own-goal, handing his opponents a quote they could repeat endlessly. But that paled in comparison to what he said a month later when government data revealed a disturbing rise in inflation.
“I love it,” he said when asked about it. “The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation.”
Aides scrambled to explain that he meant that what he loves is that inflation will come down. That’s absurd — if your oncologist said, “You know what I really love? I love the fact that you have cancer, because eventually it’ll go away,” you’d get a new oncologist.
Nevertheless, any politician who would utter the words “I love the inflation” to a room full of reporters with cameras running, especially after we all saw how damaging the inflation of 2022 was, is one with an unsound mind.
Why not apply the Biden standard to Trump?
Trump is not aging in the same way Joe Biden did.
Biden looked increasingly frail in his last year in office — his voice became quieter and raspier, he acquired a shuffling gait, and he sometimes got a confused look on his face. Though he didn’t mix up names or dates any more often than Trump does today, Biden could sound tentative where Trump speaks loudly and with complete confidence, which gives the appearance of more vigor.
But more importantly for the question of presidential aging, there was never much evidence that Biden’s aging had affected his decision-making in problematic ways. That isn’t to say it wouldn’t have had he gone through another term in office, but there isn’t anything we could point to and say “a younger Biden would never have decided to do that.”
And it’s not as though reporters didn’t look hard enough. This is a key difference in how the two presidents have been treated: While there are occasional articles analyzing Trump’s aging, the mainstream media — especially the most important agenda-setting outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — treated Biden’s age as one of the most important stories in politics, a four-alarm fire that demanded every ounce of attention they could give it.
To cover the question, they assigned teams of journalists, then gave them the time to interview as many people as they could to explore the subject from every possible angle. What do people inside the White House say about Biden’s age? What do voters think about Biden’s age? How is Biden’s age being portrayed on the internet? What do doctors say about Biden’s age?
The fruit of that reporting was long articles with multiple bylines that were splashed on the front pages in story after lengthy story (see here, here, and here), from whence the discussion spread to every other outlet in every medium. They kept reporting on it even after the election was over; Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote an entire book about Biden’s age and “its cover-up,” which got a huge amount of coverage from those same news outlets when it was released in 2025.
None of this is to say it was ever wrong to ask when a president is too old; I myself wrote about Biden’s age many times, the first of which was in 2019. And one could argue that in Biden’s case there was a practical question at hand, of whether he would run for reelection in 2024 (a question that was effectively answered by his catastrophic performance in his first debate with Trump). Part of the difference, furthermore, is that reporters love to give Democrats advice and scold them when they don’t take it, while they treat Republicans more like a weather pattern they have no way to influence.
But while Trump’s voice may still be relatively strong, there are lots of reasons to worry about how his advancing age is affecting his judgment, and the consequences are profound. Would a younger Trump have literally threatened genocide (“A whole civilization will die tonight”) against a people he claimed to be trying to help, or picked a fight with the Pope, then posted an AI image of himself as Jesus?
Would a younger Trump with his political skills and understanding of the attention economy spend so much time drawing attention to the catastrophe of his reflecting pool renovation? Would a younger and less addled Trump have decided that invading Iran was a great idea, and taken so long to get out?
There’s no way to know for sure. But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 61 percent of Americans said Trump has grown more erratic with age. They’re absolutely right — and the news media have an obligation to spend as much time as necessary exploring and explaining what the consequences could be. Because it’s only going to get worse.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
The problem is that Trump WOULD have done most of those things when he was younger. His history of making bad situations worse with impulsive, ill informed decisions, and then blaming scapegoats, should have been a flashing, blaring alarm in 2015. Instead, the GOP pandered to the people who mistook bullying for strength.
Mainstream media killed itself with its candidate coverage in 2024 and full capitulation to Trump after the election. If you don’t read independent media, you have no idea what is really going on, and that explains the majority of people in the United States.