If Democrats insist that Trump is a fascist would-be dictator, their warning that he’s too old to be effective is not exactly a frightening prospect.
As Jeff notes, Democrats and their partisans have lately been leaning into attacks on Donald Trump’s age. Trump would, of course, be the oldest man ever elected president — by a few months over Biden — and his age is a legitimate issue. In fact, it’s one of a number of reasons why he has no business running for this job again. Let me add three points to take away from the attacks on Trump’s age coming from Democrats and their partisans, why they are doing it, and why it is unlikely to make a difference.
Why make this a major Democratic argument, and why elevate it so much now? True, one might ascribe this to ancestral habit, given the youthful tilt of the Democratic voter base and the muscle memory of running younger candidates against stodgy older Republicans in 1952, 1956, 1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012. Several of those campaigns played the age card promiscuously. But then, youth is relative: Kamala Harris just turned 60, and before Joe Biden in 2020, Democrats hadn’t won with a nonincumbent candidate age 60 or older since James Buchanan in 1856.
Anyway, the more recent line of attack on Trump isn’t “He’s uncool and our candidate is young and hip,” it’s “Trump is rambling and tired and skipping events, why isn’t the press covering this as they did Biden?” That’s the tell: They’re complaining that Trump isn’t getting the full Biden treatment. That’s the sign that they’re reacting out of emotion and petulance rather than executing a strategy. It reeks of “Where’s the outrage?”
There are two emotive drivers here. One is the desire to turn the hypocrisy charge against people on the right. The other, by the ref-working corners of left media, is the search for some excuse to contend that the press is unfairly sympathetic to Donald Trump, a charge that is hilarious to anyone who has consumed any media whatsoever in the past eight years.
Why isn’t this plausible as strategy? Two reasons. One is that it just doesn’t fit how people see Trump. Yes, he’s older and slower, and if you’ve watched him closely these past nine years, you can tell that he’s more rambling, less witty, and less flexible than he was. Age comes for us all. Yet Trump is still a big, square man with big, square shoulders, a big, square face, and a big personality. He still looks and acts the part of the biggest man in the room. He doesn’t seem shrunken and tentative the way Joe Biden did even five years ago. He’s not hiding in his basement. His decline isn’t as sharp and jarring as the loss of Biden’s once-silver tongue. People may be worried that Trump has eroded, but they just don’t believe that he’s a spent force.
Second, it’s incoherent. You see commentators warning, “A vote for Trump is really a vote for J. D. Vance.” So? Is that a bad thing? I’m no fan of Vance, and there are some issues (such as Ukraine, Obamacare, taxes, and regulatory policy) on which I’d rather see Trump than Vance in charge, but, on balance, I’d still prefer to have Vance as president rather than Trump. Vance simply doesn’t match the breadth of Trump’s flaws of public and private character.
Democrats have been running around for nine years telling us that Trump is a fascist dictator we should fear for his strength, and now they say that we should fear that he’s not able to do the stuff he wants because of his age. For Republicans, Biden’s age was a unified critique: He was weak, feeble, and easily bullied by the extremists in his party. So, the threat of less Biden in a Biden administration was a serious one. Biden’s problem was that his party was crazier than he was. Trump’s problem is that he’s crazier than his party. So, the threat of less Trump in a Trump administration is . . . less bad? If you tell me that Trump is the Hitler-y-est Hitler who ever Hitlered, warning that he might not really be in charge is not exactly a frightening prospect.