America’s problem with ageing politicians extends far beyond Donald Trump and Joe Biden
Speculation over Donald Trump’s health threatens to mask an embarrassing truth about America’s politics – one that goes far beyond one man.
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Fifty-three. Forty-seven. Fifty-six. Fifty. Forty-eight. Fifty-five. Sixty. Fifty. Fifty-nine.
No, I’m not listing the abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score of every Transformers film, though most of those numbers would fit.
Did you know one of the movies actually, unironically, has a rating in the nineties? As someone who notoriously loves dumb films, I somehow had no idea. And it’s not even the one that gave a generation of boys a strange new appreciation for lady mechanics.
The existence of a good Transformers film, one with genuine emotional resonance, feels like it should be an impossibility. I mean, this is a franchise that was conceived to monetise plastic toy robots that turn into trucks, boats, and presumably other, more obscure forms of transport. That hardly screams “great storytelling potential”.
You’d love to eavesdrop on the writers’ room. “Have we done a ... have we done a 1984 Freightliner FLT yet?” “That’s literally Optimus Prime you idiot.” “Oh, right. What about ... a Spitfire plane? They’re pretty cool.” “Gerald, that’s brilliant! We’ll call him Wingobot. And in robot form he can only talk like one of those old-timey British radio guys.”
I’m sorry, but with the greatest of respect to the creative minds behind the ongoing war between the Autobots and Decepticons – I presume it’s ongoing? Otherwise they’d have to stop making movies, after all – none of the above should work as the premise for a major, blockbuster film franchise worth billions of dollars. And yet.
What else should be an impossibility?
Perhaps the failure, of a country with 330 million people, to find one human being even close to being below retirement age to put in charge. And yet!
The numbers above, from which I have digressed massively, are the ages at which every Australian prime minister of my lifetime, from Hawke to Albanese, got the job.
Malcolm Turnbull, at 60, was positively ancient by our standards. And he was almost 20 years younger than Donald Trump and Joe Biden were when they became America’s president (in Mr Trump’s case, for the second time).
Guess who, among Australia’s cohort of living prime ministers, is the closest in age to both Mr Trump and Mr Biden. It’s Paul Keating. A guy who left politics almost 30 years ago.
As Mr Biden would say, or more accurately, whisper in barely audible tones: not a joke, folks. Not a joke. The United States is being governed by people from an era other countries consigned to history decades ago. Their elections have become the rough equivalent of us pitching Keating against Howard, not in the mid-90s, but in the early 2020s.
No wonder there is a crisis of competence in the American government.
And of confidence. For multiple weeks now, there has been snowballing chatter about Mr Trump’s health, spurred on by his unusual absence from public duties for days on end, and by the sight of his hands absolutely slathered in makeup in an amusingly inept attempt to cover up bruising.
Trump’s a few blackened fingers away from being Dumbledore in Half-Blood Prince.
Do imagine, for a moment, how Australia would react if Mr Albanese turned up for a press conference looking like that? Talkback radio would be wild. You’d have office workers yelling “GAWD, HAVE YA SEEN THE PM’S HAAAANDS? HE’S DOYYYING” at each other. (I exaggerate, but only slightly. We’re a fun country.)
The White House says the bruises have been caused by excessive handshaking, as opposed to the use of a drip, for example, which has been a popular theory in the social media swamps.
Either way, they’re proof of the obvious, and I say this not as a sledge but as fact: Donald Trump is an old man. Joe Biden was an old man as well. Far too many people at the top of American politics, the people with the greatest influence over their country’s direction, are years or decades beyond their prime.
These are stubborn people in denial about their own frailty, leading a country that’s in denial about its changing place in the world. It’s an appropriate but toxic combination.
That word, denial, is the key, and the most troubling element of this situation. Mr Biden shuffled around the White House, often in front of the cameras, looking like a man searching the room for a beloved pet who died 45 years ago. He and his staff nevertheless insisted he was fit to serve a second term, which would have ended with him closer to 90 than 80.
They denied a truth that was laughably plain to anyone with unshuttered eyes.
Mr Trump speaks more sharply, and more aggressively, but often no more coherently. The President goes off on bizarre tangents. He says things that are severed from anything even resembling reality; makes stuff up out of thin air; indulges in self-delusions.
(See Mr Trump’s continuing refusal to accept the 2020 election result. Yes, he still insists he won it. Or his insistence that America’s declining jobs numbers, which may as well come with a neon sign flashing the word “DANGER”, are wrong and everything’s fine and dandy.)
He also has the pettiness and perpetual grievance complex of your grandfather who won’t shut up about a cashier giving him the wrong change at a 7-Eleven three months ago.
It is, perversely, a political benefit for Mr Trump that these traits are not entirely new. He’s always been this way, to some extent, and so it’s hard to tell whether his stranger moments, as he ages, are a product of getting older, or just of his personality.
When does “man shouts at cloud” become “old man shouts at cloud”? Probably when he starts calling the cloud a “Democratic hoax”. Or when the cloud he’s shouting at doesn’t even exist. Mr Trump crosses that line often.
And he has unquestionably lost several steps. Watch an interview of him in the 1980s, when Mr Keating was treasurer, and compare it to the Trump of today. The difference is staggering. His vocabulary has shrunk, along with his ideas. He’s a lesser man.
And again, the element of denial sticks out. The doctors who do Mr Trump’s check-ups frequently tell us he is an astonishingly impressive physical specimen. Unusually healthy. There’s an almost comedic element to it: the overweight man, with an awful diet, in his twilight years, who everyone insists is in flawless condition. It’s very Death of Stalin.
There’s nothing wrong with being old, by the way. It will happen to all of us, hopefully. (Mr Trump’s longevity on a cheeseburger and fries-based diet has given me faith that I might live past 50.) The problem is these guys’ lack of self-awareness, and the failure of America’s voters to jettison them.
Joe Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 against a field of rivals who were, mostly, decades his junior.
Donald Trump was already in his seventies when he beat a field of rising Republican stars, who were frankly more knowledgeable than him on most policy issues, in 2016. And last year, pit against successful young Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, he barely even had to campaign.
I’m picking on the two presidents, but they are not isolated examples. America’s ageing population of politicians extends beyond the White House. It’s infected both major parties. All across the spectrum, there are politicians clinging to power when everyone knows they should have retired.
The average age, among the current members of Congress, is 59. Over in the Senate, a third of the chamber features people aged 70 or older.
It’s unrepresentative in the sense that the people making decisions are far older than those who will be affected by them. And it threatens the basic competence of the US government.
Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator, died in 2023, while still in office. She was 90, with an accomplished career behind her. You could argue it was even a trailblazing one.
For years before her death, as she refused to leave Congress, the signs of advanced ageing were excruciatingly apparent.
Ms Feinstein would ask the same question multiple times at hearings, seemingly oblivious to the repetition. She would accuse her staff of failing to brief her on a topic just after they had done so. She’d frequently forget things she herself had said. The senator’s office ensured at least one staffer was always following her around the building, out of worry for what she might say to passing reporters.
To be fair, there are a few relatively young MPs in our own parliament who could benefit from having a permanent babysitter.
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who is still serving at the age of 83, was until January his party’s leader in the Senate. He, too, has had an accomplished career. You could make the case that he’s been the most effective Republican in Congress this century, albeit in a rather ploddingly Machiavellian way.
Multiple times, in 2023, Mr McConnell froze during media conferences. Just froze, completely. In the middle of speaking to reporters, he trailed off and stood silently, staring off into space, unreachable, for more than 30 seconds.
After the second time, he said he’d consult a doctor, but there was no talk of his resigning from the Senate, nor of his stepping down as leader. He just continued in the job as though nothing had happened.
Perhaps my favourite example of this, in a morbid way, is the Texas Congresswoman Kay Granger, who disappeared from Washington D.C. for six months, missing every vote, until local media figured out where she was late last year.
She was living at a retirement home, in a full-time memory care unit, having been found wandering the streets of her neighbourhood, apparently lost. Her family later acknowledged she’d been “having some dementia issues”.
Ms Granger has since resigned. But for those six months, before she was rumbled by the press, she was still getting her publicly funded pay cheques and supposedly representing her district in Congress. In truth, those constituents had no congresswoman, because the person who was meant to be that congresswoman was secretly hiding in an aged care home that specialises in dementia patients. The cheek!
What is the point of a public servant who’s incapable of properly serving the public?
I could keep going with case studies here, but I think the point has been made. This is an endemic problem in American politics, to an extent other countries just don’t accept.
And look, these people’s stories all have a tragic tinge. It’s hard to acknowledge that your time in a position of power is up, or that you’re no longer as formidable as you once were. You feel for them. But that doesn’t change reality.
Even Tom Brady eventually retired, and to be frank, most of these people were more Sam Darnold than Brady even in their prime.
I don’t know what the deal is with Trump. Maybe he’ll be fine to remain President until 2029.
What I do know is this: we can trust neither Mr Trump himself nor the sycophants who surround him to be honest about his condition. Joe Biden’s White House taught us that by systematically covering up the full extent of his ageing.
Does anyone believe that, if Mr Trump were to become incapable of doing the job, anyone around him would tell us? Or would even dare to tell him?
No. And it’s an indictment of America’s political system, of its voters, and of its self-deluding leaders that we even need to ask.
Twitter: @SamClench
Originally published as America’s problem with ageing politicians extends far beyond Donald Trump and Joe Biden
