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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?
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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.