Joe Biden: Too old to be president? President Joe Biden’s fall during the Air Force Academy’s commencement ceremony has thrust his age into the spotlight. Biden and the White House said he tripped over a sandbag on the stage. The president currently is the oldest ever in the post at age 80.
It was already an issue, as a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed last month. Only 33 percent of Americans said they thought Biden’s age did not disqualify him from another term, the poll found.
Biden’s March 2021 fall down the stairs of Air Force One suggests this might not be an isolated incident. The video of that fall shows he did not trip over anything but suddenly appeared to have lost control of his legs.
The president also suddenly fell off his bike in June 2022 while vacationing in Rehoboth Beach, Del., as he stopped to greet well-wishers.
Biden has a history of cardiac problems, including atrial fibrillation, for which he has been prescribed anticoagulants.
“[If] someone falls and hits their head or hips while on a blood thinner, there is more of a chance of a medical emergency than for people not on anticoagulants,” Stuart Fischer, an internal medicine doctor, told The Daily Mail in April. “A head injury when someone is an anticoagulant is potentially disastrous.”
In terms of the president’s health, White House Physician Kevin C. O’Connor wrote that he could not find any indication that Biden suffers from dementia. He noted that the president has a stiffened gait.
Others have noted that Joe Biden suffered from two brain aneurysms in 1988 and have suggested that their long-term consequences could harm the president, who often seems confused and disoriented.
“Whether you’re going to lose your presidency, or lose your driving license or lose your job, subjectively, you will be under-appreciating your symptoms, and not putting enough importance to those symptoms,” Elena Mucci, a geriatric doctor, and American College of Physicians member told The DailyMail. “I think [Biden] knows exactly what is going on, but he’s not openly acknowledged it because he doesn’t want to lose that presidency.”
Biden’s Aging Could Put Presidency in Uncharted Waters
Joe Biden will be 86 if he is reelected and survives to finish a second term.
“From an actuarial perspective, the life expectancy of somebody who has reached Biden’s age is 89 years old, meaning that the odds are in favor of his surviving a second term. However, the issue of concern is not merely one of whether he can literally make it past the finish line. Winston Churchill lived to be 90, but a severe stroke at 79 while he was prime minister left the British government effectively without a leader for months. Ronald Reagan lived to be 93 but began suffering the visible effects of Alzheimer’s in his early 80s,” the National Review editorial board wrote.
It continued: “The 25th Amendment provides an option to remove a president if he is found by the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In practice, it is difficult to imagine this being invoked unless Biden is fully incapacitated. But the worrisome thought is that there are a lot of intermediate steps, short of death or unconsciousness, by which an elderly person can decline.”
DeSantis Seizes on Symbolism
The White House claimed that the president was not hurt; however, that did not keep Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis from seizing on the symbolism of Biden’s fall.
“It’s a sad thing to see,” DeSantis said in Beaufort County, S.C., on Friday. “You don’t want to see anyone do that. But it was frustrating because honestly, that was symbolic of the state of our country.”
“Our country continues to stub its toe,” he added. “Our country continues to trip and fall. Our country continues to go in the wrong direction.”
Democrat Columnist Echoes DeSantis
Liberal columnist Mark Leibovich echoed DeSantis’ comments a year ago in a column in The Atlantic.
“Biden’s advanced age was presented as a kind of proxy for the tired and hobbled state of his agenda and the Democratic Party. To see the sentiment presented so universally among prominent Democrats was rather jarring,” Leibovich wrote. “At the very least, Biden not running would unleash a profusion of youth and energy into the Democratic field.
He continued: “The non-AARP-card-carrying likes of Pete Buttigieg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Chris Murphy or whoever it is could stand silently on the soapbox of the Iowa State Fair for five hours, and it would still feel like a refreshing change. They could commence with the Democrats’ long-overdue debate about their next leaders and best ideas.”
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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