‘Donald Trump Is Old,’ Sputters a Tired and Wheezing Harris Campaign

I know that Trump supporters — to say nothing of people who simply find Kamala Harris laughably contemptible — are feeling fairly cheerful in these last few weeks before the election. Given my native disposition, that sort of thing tends to send a shiver of premonitory fear down my spine. You always ride highest before the fall, after all, and every poll in this race remains agonizingly close; seven states genuinely could go either way. (In particular, all of us when analyzing polls have become far too comfortable with tacitly assuming that Trump will not just perform to his numbers but outperform them. Maybe, maybe not.) I like to think of myself as the lowly slave appointed to whisper in the triumphant general’s ear as he parades through the adoring masses of Rome: “Memento mori.” Do not forget, you too are mortal.

As it turns out, Kamala Harris’s campaign is now doing the same thing! Except that, instead of whispering, they are simpering it out loud in every public appearance and on a very different, rather literal level. Yes, in the final stages of the 2024 campaign, Harris and her surrogates are sputtering through their newest closing argument to the American people: Donald Trump is really, really old.

Listen to any one of her rally speeches — she’ll spend time dwelling on the subject. Take note when any Harris surrogate appears on cable news. You will inevitably hear variations on the theme of “Trump is old and tired, people, don’t you realize that?” from every professional Democratic gumflapper out there, and it’s so hardwired into the message discipline of these final weeks of the campaign that, hilariously, I noticed one campaign flack who couldn’t help but shoehorn it into a conversation on MSNBC as she and the host were panicking over footage of Trump serving fries at McDonald’s.

After the McDonald’s stunt, Trump went to a Pittsburgh Steelers game. After the Steelers game, he took questions from voters at a forum. That was Sunday for him. Neither of these candidates has a schedule as packed as those of the presidential campaigns of yesteryear — and there is no question that Trump is indeed too old to be running for president (this is the least of his demerits, amusingly enough) — but the bald truth is that Donald Trump doesn’t act like a weak, aged man. If he is only simulating vigor, then it’s a heck of a simulation, good enough to convince even someone who viscerally dislikes him. His fastball has rather clearly lost some of its edge — his verbal pitches often flutter around a bit more like screwballs these days — but he doesn’t project the sense of weakness or exhaustion that people his age often do.

And the attempt by the Harris campaign to highlight his age as a desperate, last-second messaging ploy is even more hilarious given, erm, rather recent Democratic history. America is already extremely familiar with what a decaying commander in chief looks like — that is the reason Kamala Harris is even here. We have had three and a half years to observe the fragility of Joe Biden, and to ask voters to forget the contrast between him and Trump — at similar ages — is to ask them to discount the evidence of their own eyes and ears. (In fact, what voters were prevented from discovering in 2020, because of the Covid-19 “basement campaign,” is how well on his way to terminal senescence Biden was even back then.)

I will repeat: Donald Trump arguably is too old to be president. Like many others of my generation, I tire of our political gerontocracy and wonder why a properly jaded and ironically distanced Xennial can’t somehow be parachuted into the Oval Office instead. But Kamala Harris, a woman who herself just turned 60, is not a convincing answer to the problem. Voters aren’t worried about age so much as they’re worried about age as a marker of declining mental faculties, and — whatever else your estimation of Donald Trump’s faculties might be — he seems to be the same Trump he always was. It’s a losing argument for Harris in particular to be making, given that her primary weakness with voters is that they doubt whether she has any mental faculties in the first place, or how we would even notice should they decline.