Joe Biden is a little tired.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Biden is, after all, the president of the United States. He has a demanding job, an intense travel schedule and a re-election campaign looming, Most presidents, one would assume, are tired a lot of the time.
But Biden’s tiredness is one “bombshell” from a forthcoming biography of the 46th president by the journalist Franklin Foer.
“His advanced years were a hindrance, depriving him of the energy to cast a robust public presence or the ability to easily conjure a name,” Foer writes in The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future. Biden reportedly takes few meetings and schedules few events before 10am. “In private,” Foer writes, “he would occasionally admit that he felt tired.”
Being president is no doubt exhausting. George W Bush notoriously went to bed by 10pm, needed eight hours of sleep to be functional, tried to squeeze the enormous demands of the presidency into an eight-hour day, and took ample relaxation time. Bill Clinton, who slept four hours a night or less, also reportedly told a friend: “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.”
For Biden, though, a normal human reaction – being tired while working one of the most demanding jobs on Earth – takes on outsized importance because the president is elderly.
To be clear, Foer isn’t wrong that Biden’s age is a concern: at 80, he is the oldest president in American history, and if he wins in 2024, he’ll be 86 when he leaves office. And the president’s advanced age no doubt does leave Biden, as Foer put it, experiencing “physical decline and time’s dulling of mental faculties that no pill or exercise regime can resist”.
Just how much is Biden’s advanced age affecting his ability to do his job? That’s a valid question.
What’s infuriating, though, is how that question is used as a cudgel by the right, despite the fact that their preferred guy – Donald Trump, who continues to lead in Republican primary polls – is also an elderly man, just three years Biden’s junior, and demonstrates even more worrying signs of both cognitive and physical decline, as well as narcissism, grandiosity and dishonesty.
Still, nearly 90% of Republicans say Biden is too old to be president, but only 29% say the same about Trump, who is roughly the same age and will also leave office in his 80s if he wins in 2024.
Nor is it the case that Trump is demonstrably fitter than Biden. By many accounts, Trump’s physical and cognitive health is poor. He’s both elderly and obese, which puts him at greater risk of a host of mental and physical problems, including dementia, cancer and cardiovascular failure. He has evinced significant cognitive decline, saying he can’t remember notable conversations and events, and that he doesn’t know people he has clearly met.
During Trump’s presidency, some of those around him worried that he had lost his mind. Over the years he has grown less and less coherent, more paranoid, more conspiratorial. His speech is erratic, his thoughts disorganized, and he makes simple factual errors – for example, seeming to forget where his father was born. As Trump’s years in the Oval Office ticked by, the question of whether there was something neurologically wrong with him became all the more urgent.
The man says he can’t even remember saying he has one of the world’s best memories.
The default assumption now seems to be that Trump is simply lying, and indeed that might be the case (if it is, it should also be disqualifying). But either he’s lying or he’s not firing on all cylinders – or, perhaps, both.
Trump has also exhibited signs of having a serious personality disorder, and while mental health professionals are careful about weighing in on a person’s psychological state without having examined them, some have at least outlined the telltale signs and allowed the reader to draw their own conclusions. Researchers have even drawn a connection between Trump’s seeming pathological narcissism and narcissistic traits among his supporters. This seems at least as concerning as Biden feeling tired.
The fact that the 2024 election seems likely to be between two men in their golden years is itself a disturbing sign of American degeneration. Both political parties feel stagnant. But only one party is careening toward authoritarianism and lining up behind a candidate who has undermined American democracy and been indicted in several jurisdictions for serious crimes.
Biden’s age, and any exhaustion that goes with it, is a valid concern, and a legitimate area of inquiry for a biographer or journalist. The voting public, though, may soon be faced with a binary choice: on the one hand is an ageing but extremely experienced man who has begun to right the economy, forgiven student loan debt, invested in nationwide infrastructure projects, appointed a slew of new judges and is currently taking historic action on prescription drug prices – and yes, he is old and tired.
And on the other hand is an ageing narcissist who took a strong economy and sent it into a tailspin, cut taxes for the super-rich, left office with fewer American jobs than when he started, oversaw a chaotic and disastrous pandemic response, appointed supreme court justices who went on to strip abortion rights from American women, made it more difficult for Americans to access healthcare, made abusing power and profiting from the office something of a personal hobby, rolled back protections for the environment and endangered species, attacked immigrants and tried to ban refugees from coming in, and then refused to accept the results of a free and fair US election, fomenting an attempted coup that left several Americans dead.
I could certainly go on. But in a contest between these two old men of almost the same old age, where one is tired and imperfect and the other unhinged and malignant, Biden’s slight seniority is only an issue because there’s so little else to raise.
Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
