Trump Showing His Age on Campaign Trail – Former President Donald Trump has increasingly demonstrated his advanced age on the campaign trail in recent weeks.
Trump has contrasted himself with his successor by claiming that he is more with it that he is more vigorous at 77 than Joe Biden is at 80.
And yet, Trump has begun to show his own age with shuffles across the stage and pointing at non-existent supporters with his back to the crowd.
Trump’s opponents have seized on his age, mocking him for claiming that Biden wanted to get America into “World War II” instead of World War III.
“And look, I’m not looking to get into the mud about which septuagenarian or octogenarian politician is too old; they’re all old, we get it. But what I will do is point out the obvious, glaring hypocrisy of both Republicans and many in the media who relentlessly hammer Biden on his age, his mental acuity, and his fitness to serve when those same people are conveniently silent when Trump says things that are far worse,” MSNBC columnist Brian Taylor Cohen wrote in September column.
Age: Donald Trump’s Biggest Fear?
Trump’s closest GOP rival also suggested that Trump has slowed down a bit intellectually since his first election almost eight years ago.
“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.
“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”
The former president has faced enormous stress amid his mounting legal obstacles.
It is unclear how they are impacting his performance on the campaign trail.
In contrast with Biden who has consistently shown increased frailty, Trump’s verbal slips have not typically been accompanied with complete confusion.
“It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics,” Michael Bender and Michael Gold write in The New York Times. “But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president.”
Voters: Trump and Biden Are Too Old
Voters said in an August AP/NORC poll by a 43% margin that both candidates were too old.
Of those, 63% said they would vote for Biden, and 13% said they would vote for Trump.
A Franklin and Marshall College poll of Pennsylvania voters found similar results.
“According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie,” the New York Times reported. “Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, said that Mr. Biden’s wide lead among voters who were worried about both candidates’ ages could be explained partly by the fact that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify age as a problem for their party’s leader.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst 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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