If a reminder was necessary as to the potential stakes in 2024’s election, former president Donald Trump’s performance at a CNN town hall with New Hampshire voters on May 10 provided it. The Republican front-runner remains as committed to his lies about the 2020 election, as extreme in his approach to major issues — for example, encouraging GOP members of Congress to hold the debt limit hostage for “massive cuts” — and as belligerent as ever. Mr. Trump’s nomination is not yet ensured, but his words foreshadowed the chaos that a second Trump administration might bring.
Opinion How should Americans think about Biden’s age? Like this.
By the Editorial Board
May 19, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
Therefore, the event provided a fresh reason to focus on President Biden’s bid for reelection, which appears to be unopposed except by two long shots within the Democratic Party. The strong likelihood of Mr. Biden’s nomination, in turn, raises his greatest vulnerability in a general election: his age. In seeking another four-year term so late in life, Mr. Biden, who would be 82 on Nov. 20, 2024, is asking voters to do something unprecedented. And they seem to have reservations about it. Seventy percent of U.S. adults do not believe Mr. Biden should run again, and 69 percent cite his age as either a “major” or “minor” reason, according to a recent NBC News survey.
What is the right way to think about this unique situation? First, voters need to maintain a sense of perspective. “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative,” the president likes to say. He has a point, particularly if the alternative to four more years of Mr. Biden is four more years of Mr. Trump — who would himself be 78 on Election Day next year.
Nevertheless, there is a rational basis to concerns about Mr. Biden’s age. His frequent verbal lapses do not help assuage them. There is no public evidence these moments reflect anything other than the forgetfulness and difficulty at multitasking that often occurs among generally healthy seniors, according to the National Institute on Aging. In a way, though, that’s just the point. They’re normal. Voters can expect more of the same in a second term.
Mr. Biden’s physicians have declared him, credibly, in good physical and mental shape relative to his years. Yet Social Security Administration actuarial data indicates the average person his age can expect to live an additional 8.5 years. This points to another reality: the risk, in a second term, of serious health challenges or even invocation of the 25th Amendment, which deals with presidential disability.
History provides at least one counterexample: Konrad Adenauer was 87 when he stepped down after 14 years as chancellor of West Germany, having started in 1949 at the age of 73. Still, the median age of world leaders is 62, according to the Pew Research Center. And the U.S. presidency, with its enormous international responsibilities, is an especially demanding office. Nor is the presidency comparable with service in Congress (median age: 57.9 years for the House; 65.3 years for the Senate), where an aged member’s death or disability could force a single state or district into a possibly disruptive transition — but not a whole branch of government.
In short, Mr. Biden’s age is not inevitably the decisive issue, but it is a real one, and he will have to address it, forthrightly, whether the choice in 2024 is between him and Mr. Trump or another Republican. The public has a right to know details about his health, physical and mental, and about what he is doing to maintain it. The president also has an obligation to interact with the public, especially with reporters, regularly, and in settings that are not tightly controlled by the White House staff.
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End of carousel- Lawyers plead guilty in racketeering case in Fulton County, Ga.
- The Biden administration announces more than $100 million to improve maternal health.
- Wisconsin Republicans back off impeachment threat against justice.
- Bahrain’s hunger strike ends, for now, after concessions to prisoners.
- A Saudi court sentences a retired teacher to death based on tweets.
Attorneys for Donald Trump have pleaded guilty in the racketeering case led by Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis. Even those lawyers related to the deals focused on equipment-tampering in rural Coffee County are relevant to the former president — they help to establish the “criminal enterprise” of which prosecutors hope to prove Mr. Trump was the head. The news is a sign that the courts might be the place where 2020 election lies finally crash upon the rocks of reality. The Editorial Board wrote about the wide range of the indictment in August.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced more than $103 million in funding to address the maternal health crisis. The money will boost access to mental health services, help states train more maternal health providers and bolster nurse midwifery programs. These initiatives are an encouraging step toward tackling major gaps in maternal health and well-being. In August, the Editorial Board wrote about how the United States can address its maternal mortality crisis.
Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) announced Tuesday that Republicans would allow the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau to draw legislative maps, a dramatic reversal after years of opposing such an approach to redistricting. A new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court is expected to throw out the current maps, which make Wisconsin the most gerrymandered state in America. Mr. Vos has been threatening to impeach Justice Janet Protasiewicz, whose election this spring flipped control of the court, in a bid to keep those maps. This led to understandable outcry. Now it seems Mr. Vos is backing off his impeachment threat and his efforts to keep the state gerrymandered. Read our editorial on the Protasiewicz election here.
Prisoners are eating again in Bahrain after the government agreed to let them spend more hours outside and expanded their access to visitors, a welcome development ahead of the crown prince’s visit to Washington this week. Activists say the monthlong hunger strike will resume on Sept. 30 if these promises aren’t kept. Read our editorial calling for the compassionate release of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a political prisoner since 2011 who participated in the strike.
A retired teacher in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, has been sentenced to death by the country’s Specialized Criminal Court solely based on his tweets, retweets and YouTube activity, according to Human Rights Watch. The court’s verdict, July 10, was based on two accounts on X, formerly Twitter, which had only a handful of followers. The posts criticized the royal family. The sentence is the latest example of dictatorships imposing harsh sentences on people who use social media for free expression, highlighted in our February editorial.
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The good news is that, after a long period of shunning the media, Mr. Biden has fielded questions on several occasions, including an April 26 joint news conference with the South Korean president. In that encounter, he acknowledged that voters are evaluating this historically unparalleled aspect of his candidacy: “I respect them taking a hard look at it. I’d take a hard look at it as well,” he said. That was the right attitude. By acting on it, Mr. Biden could reassure voters and shift the campaign to the contrast between his record and the GOP brand: Trump-style right-wing populism.
To be sure, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are well-known figures about whom voters have already formed strong opinions. In a rematch between them, the age issue might change the votes of only a relative handful of people. Indeed, advanced age is a question mark for Mr. Trump, too, though one that’s overshadowed by his defects of character, temperament and extremism.
In an ideal world, the U.S. political system would enable a generational update among our presidential candidates. In the real world, it looks as if voters in 2024 will have to weigh Mr. Biden’s advanced age more or less as he proposes — not compared with the alternatives they wish they had but compared with the ones they do.
