In a report sure to find its place in the annals of politically damaging exonerations, Robert Hur, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, cleared the president of any wrongdoing and explicitly distinguished his behavior from the more egregious fault of Donald Trump in a similar case. But Hur, a Republican, also noted that he did not recommend indictments, in part because Biden would likely be presented to the jury as an “older, well-meaning man with a poor memory.” Among his claims was that Biden could not remember when he had been vice president, nor when his son Beau had died, “even after several years.”
Biden supporters saw this language as a gratuitous partisan attack, a speculative salvo far beyond the purview of the prosecutor; his lawyers said this was “highly prejudicial”. Clearly sensing the precariousness of the moment, the White House called a press conference in which Biden forcefully disputed Hur’s characterization. Minutes later, however, responding to a question about hostage negotiations in Israel, he referred to the Egyptian president as the leader of Mexico. One Democrat declared it “the worst day of his presidency.”
Biden’s age, of course, has long been a topic of debate, and conservatives have spent much of his presidency sharing snippets of misremembered names and mispronounced words. (Last month, at an event in Iowa, Trump even mocked Biden’s stutter.) But the report, which carries the imprimatur of an official investigation, has changed the atmospheric conditions. If old age was in the air, the clouds would burst. Hur’s remarks were very cutting because they resonate with what many voters already think. In a Swing-State poll conducted by the Times last fall, 71% of respondents said Biden was too old to be president; more than six in ten people thought he lacked the mental acuity to hold the position. (In a national poll, a majority of Democrats also say he is too old for a second term.) Other surveys suggest that being old is considered a kind of crime: Americans are just as reluctant to support candidates over eighty years old and candidates who “I have been accused of a crime. A third of those questioned would set the maximum age of elected officials at seventy years (and some would set it even lower). By that standard, about a fifth of today’s Congress would be overwhelmed.
Ageism certainly plays a role in such attitudes. But it would be a mistake to present concerns about Biden’s age as simply a concentration of prejudice against older people. Trump, if re-elected, would also finish his term as an octogenarian, but voters harbor far fewer doubts about his age. (It’s possible that the age issue is being overshadowed by Trump’s broader inconsistency; earlier this month, he claimed Democrats were trying to change Pennsylvania’s name and encouraged Russia to attack U.S. allies.) In Biden’s case, the public is reacting. to the particularities of its presentation and performance. Film footage of his speeches from 2016 or 2020 and you don’t need to take last week’s videos out of context, or process them with AI, to witness a man who has aged. He is thinner, his hair is thinner. He moves more cautiously and speaks more softly.
Our minds evolve naturally throughout our lives. In general, fluid intelligence – our ability to think creatively, reason abstractly, and learn new skills – declines with age, while crystallized intelligence, by which we integrate accumulated knowledge to solve problems and making decisions, tends to increase. The speed at which we process new information peaks in our 20s and 30s; our vocabulary extends into our late 50s. Memory loss exists on a spectrum, and even talking about “memory” as a monolith is misleading. (Deficits in working memory versus long-term memory, for example, suggest different pathologies.) Geriatricians often try to differentiate normal age-related memory loss from what is called cognitive impairment light. While the former results in minor and occasional errors: Where is my phone? when is his birthday ? – the latter indicates a more significant limitation and, in a third of cases, progresses to Alzheimer’s disease within five years. These determinations are made through a battery of neuropsychiatric tests and a series of careful conversations with patients and their families – not cable news or special counsel.
Perhaps the most accurate thing that can be said about aging is that it is an extremely heterogeneous process. Some people enter old age and experience rapid decline; some people remain vigilant until the day they die. And yet it is also true that, in most cases, age is not decisive. A risk factor but THE risk factor. An octogenarian in excellent health is more likely to have a heart attack than a sedentary thirty-year-old who smokes. Your risk of stroke doubles every ten years after the age of fifty-five. The average eighty-four year old man has a ten percent chance of dying in the next year. But averages are averages, and whoever assumes the presidency is anything but average. Biden has access to world-class medical care; he trains regularly; he doesn’t drink or smoke. His father died at eighty-six years old and his mother lived to be ninety years old, in fairly good health until the end. Some longevity researchers, after reviewing publicly available medical information on Biden and Trump, have called both men “super-aged.” Yet time inflicts insults on us in many ways, small and – increasingly as the years go by – large.
Doctors sometimes make a distinction between the patient in the record and the actual patient. The first is a product of the medical record: the sum of blood tests, x-rays and urine samples. The second is invariably more important: how a person looks, feels and acts; what it can do and to what extent it can do it. In the battle to allay concerns about Biden’s age, his most powerful weapon is not a doctor’s note or cognitive exam, but his job performance and transparency on the campaign trail. Biden has led one of the most productive legislative terms since Lyndon B. Johnson but, to date, has held fewer news conferences and given fewer interviews than any president since Ronald Reagan. He avoided town halls and, for the second year in a row, he skipped the interview before the Super Bowl, when presidents usually address one of the largest audiences in the country, opting instead for a curated TikTok video .
There’s no doubt that Biden faces a wicked asymmetry when speaking live and unscripted: A smooth interview disappears unnoticed, while every misstep sparks a social media frenzy. But demonstrating his fitness for office could be his surest path to re-election and, at this point, the country’s best chance at preventing the chaos and dysfunction of a second Trump term. A more vigorous and visible Biden would speak for himself. If this approach seems too risky, that also says something. ♦
