Donald Trump looks lousy. He has unexplained bruises on his hands. His ankles are swollen. He’s walking oddly. He keeps mixing up names, or using the wrong word during press availabilities.
So is it fair game to publicly probe whether Trump is at death’s door? And before answering, think about what you said roughly 18 months ago about Joe Biden, especially after special counsel Robert Hur interviewed the president and described him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
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The question about what’s legitimate in diagnosing presidents from afar has become more than just an academic exercise, given that they endure one of the world’s most demanding jobs. The debate has also been fueled by the age of the last two White House occupants — Biden, 82, and Trump, 79 — as well as the fact both have been less than forthcoming in revealing alleged health concerns.
Biden and Trump’s aging, and how it’s covered, has turned into a thorny topic for the news media. Almost inevitably, reporters will face finger pointing, accusations of ageism and partisan bad-faith criticism. But at the same time, you want them to be able to ask a direct question: Is the president in good health?
Social media has no such compunctions about speculation. The last few weeks have seen considerable focus on signs of Trump’s ill health, with online sleuths parsing photos and even soliciting online diagnoses from medical professionals, who have obliged. A search of Trump and “congestive heart failure” reveals a condition that some believe he suffers from, with the caveat that those conclusions are being shared via X posts and divined from what people are seeing on TV.
If the discussion at times slips into ageism, it’s exacerbated by the political class having developed the habit of hanging on long past customary retirement age, and occasionally until the bitter end. As examples, think of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at 87 in 2020; and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died in office two years ago, at age 90, after questions arose about her vitality and ability to do the job.
For Biden, his visible physical and mental frailty became harder and harder to ignore, until it was put in the spotlight at the presidential debate, forcing him to withdraw from the 2024 race. The subsequent hand-wringing spawned a book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which took the media to task for not pursuing the matter more aggressively while he was still in office.
How the press handled Biden hangs over its treatment of similar issues regarding Trump, triggering accusations of a double standard. Nor does it help that Trump’s history of fabrication has included characterizations of his physical prowess and stamina — clearly lying about his weight, for one thing, to give himself the dimensions of an NFL quarterback, while avoiding the dreaded “O” word (“obese”) should anyone calculate his Body Mass Index.
The White House doesn’t help by taking defenses of Trump to comical extremes, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt proclaiming him to be in “excellent health” in July, while attributing the visible hand bruises to “minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking.”
In The New Republic, Timothy Noah cited Trump’s weight “obsession” as one of several examples of “narcissistic projection” — that is, tossing insults at people, like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, that actually describe him. In this case, Noah wrote, “He’s an overweight man who calls other people (less politely) overweight.”
Vanity aside, those looking for signs Trump isn’t the paragon of virility he and his subordinates profess him to be have found plenty of evidence, including video of him seeming to nod off during his military parade in June and the E. Jean Carroll trial, as well as a string of verbal gaffes that surely rival Biden’s.
The somewhat thornier matter for news outlets involves discerning whether that denotes a serious problem, as opposed to a relatively standard one for someone Trump’s or Biden’s ages.
How people have talked about the two on social media was explored in a study conducted by Canadian researchers, “Ageism during the 2024 United States Presidential Election: Thematic Analysis of Tweets,” published by the Gerontological Society of America’s journal in July.
The researchers identified four key themes: old age as an inherent weakness; dementia-related stigma; dehumanization of older adults; and fear of “perceived incompetence.”
“Accusations of dementia and cognitive impairment as political weapons were at the core of many tweets, framing electoral candidates as inherently disqualifying,” the researchers noted.
Much of that came from Trump and his surrogates, who wielded slurs like “Dementia Joe” and “Sleepy Joe” to describe the former president. From that perspective, Democrats might understandably conclude that turnabout is fair play.
The challenge, of course, is addressing the impact of aging on these high-profile individuals and not painting with a too-broad brush. Because as gerontologist Tracey Gordon told NPR during the 2024 campaign, “Age in and of itself does not tell you what somebody’s experiences are, what somebody’s values are, what somebody’s health status is, what somebody’s cognitive status is.”
No two people age at the exact same pace. As it happens, Bruce Springsteen’s landmark album “Born to Run” turned 50 this week, a trip down memory lane that feels more notable realizing the singer-songwriter is still performing and filling venues at 75 — one of several age-defying rock stars that readily come to mind.
It’s worth noting, too, that attempts to diagnose Trump remotely have a fair amount of precedent. That includes Duty to Warn, a group of psychiatrists that challenged what’s known as the “Goldwater Rule,” named for former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, whose mental fitness was questioned during the 1964 campaign. In the wake of that, an American Psychiatric Association guideline stated that psychiatrists shouldn’t diagnose anyone they haven’t evaluated personally.
“We believed Trump’s mental state presented a danger to the public and felt we had a duty to warn them,” two psychiatrists involved in the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” wrote in 2018, justifying their actions.
A few things seem obvious, and really ought to be bipartisan: Not all septuagenarians or octogenarians age the same way, and the fitness of the President of the United States and other political leaders — mental, physical, you name it — represents a legitimate source of inquiry and concern.
For many of those weighing in, the issue is when legitimate analysis begins spilling into ageism or indulging in leaps that border on the absurd. In the cases of Trump and Biden, that often appears to boil down to where one sits on the political aisle, or, tribalism being what it is, a rather dark strain of wishful thinking.
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