Trump vs. Biden is the clash of the geriatric gladiators, a combined 158 years old

This month one year ago, I wrote in these pages that old age would dominate all other issues in the 2024 political campaign.

It was back when our governor, Ron DeSantis, was still a contender, and his beloved “woke” issues were sparking in the political ether. But even before he quickly flamed out, and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump prevailed, I argued that age would be the ring to rule them all. At 78 myself, I imagined the presidential debates later this year: “I’ll be leaning forward on my cane to see which guy makes it through a 90-minute debate without making a run for the bathroom. I know I couldn’t.”

Just establishing my bona fides, friends.

Barry Golson [ Barry Golson ]

With the near-certainty that the candidates will be by-then-78-year-old Donald Trump and 81-year-old Joe Biden, old age and health have moved to the center lane of our political life. A majority of the public thinks both candidates are too old to be president. We have two — sometimes three — wars to manage, a democracy crisis, a climate crisis, a border crisis, inflation to tame. But the dominant campaign topic isn’t any of those things. It’s not “the economy, stupid.” It’s “the EKG, stupid.”

The fear that we’re going to be governed by the Walking Dead has become the new media reality. And in the U.S. in 2024, when something trends, it’s no longer just a storm, it’s an extinction-level tsunami. News outlets, television shows and, especially, social media collectively go nuts. Nonstop TikToks of old-guy shaming. Mostly of Joe Biden, with clips of his miscues and memory lapses, his shuffling gait. It’s not inaccurate, but it sure is selective.

Even his supporters admit that Biden can sound frail and ancient, especially if he’s tired or defensive. Sometimes, he’s crisp, able to manage the world; other times he’s doddering, unable to manage his mouth. Will anyone ever tell him, “No, Joe! Don’t come back to the podium for that last question”?

Depending on your news feed — and we all have our own, now — Donald Trump comes in for his share, too. Especially at his standup gigs-cum-Mussolini rallies. There, he may call on Russia to invade NATO clearly enough, but lapses into incoherence about 20 minutes in. Trump gets away with more, as he always does. Biden’s crowd clutches their pearls. Trump’s base doesn’t care what he says; they just pump their fists. His concert followers aren’t there to listen to the lyrics; they’re there for the rimshots.

We still have eight months to endure in this stressful, interminable campaign. That’s assuming we don’t go into Trump election-overturn overtime in November. Some of us are tuned out at this stage. But it’s already turned millions of TV watchers and social media users, here and abroad, into obsessed intensive-care geriatric attendants. We’re primed to watch, as if from the foot of the sickbed, every twitch made by two battered gladiators. We — and the cameras — will hover, watch for any misstep, wince at the next garbled sentence, pounce on the next misnamed leader or world capital. As for expecting the Mitch McConnell Freeze — deer in the highlights — just wait: It almost seems inevitable, doesn’t it?

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I guess it wouldn’t be a real campaign these days without a Comey moment. The media tsunami crested early with the findings of Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed to investigate document hoarding by Biden. The president was legally cleared but couldn’t catch a break.

Luck is underrated in politics. Trump hoarded his classified documents, including nuclear secrets, hid them, showed them around, lied about them, stashed them by his gold-edged toilet and got indicted. By luck, he drew the one local rookie judge he’d appointed himself; she might delay the trial indefinitely. In another of his trials, the D.A. put her boyfriend on the payroll, and the entire case might go away. Trump may not ride a bike like Biden, but he sure can skate.

Biden, on the other hand, turned over his docs, apologized, but he drew Hur, a Republican and apparent student of snark. While clearing Biden of the charges, Hur decided the world needed his personal opinion. He could have used boilerplate legalese (“Subject did not recollect”). After all, Trump pleaded memory loss more than 500 times at just one hearing. Instead, Hur wrote that Biden appeared a “well-intentioned elderly man with a poor memory,” who couldn’t even remember what years he served as vice president, or the year his first son died. As an elder, I call out the oozing condescension in the choice of words. Coming soon: the miniseries.

Age is a number

This brings us back to my arena. How old is too old? Where’s the line between losing a few steps, and seriously losing one’s marbles? Between normal aging and abnormal mentation? Most of us know, innately. Not only do we have friends, colleagues, acquaintances and forgetful relatives who fit both definitions; if we’re honest, we’ve wondered about it ourselves.

I myself am a “well-intentioned, elderly man” with a fair-to-middling memory. I’m a bit of an expert on the medically rougher, not-for-sissies stage of life. I know what it’s like to have your ailments on autorotation. I’ve reported before on old friends’ dinners and required organ recitals. The ravages of time? Intimately acquainted.

As an immunocompromised guy, I live in a state where I wake up not knowing what protection will be snatched away next. DeSantis’ surgeon general, notorious anti-vaccine zealot Joseph Ladapo, has just struck again. He’s discouraging the measles vaccine, which has kept the super-contagious disease at bay since I was in high school. Why? For “freedom.” With measles cases again appearing for the first time in decades, it’s not just kids at risk. Old folks, too. Not only do I go on mole patrol, now I have to be on the lookout for red splotches, too. (Please, please, someone get Ladapo transferred to Alabama, so he can harass embryo users instead.)

But on the mental front, I can attest to what happens when the synapses start slowing. When our thoughts begin to outrace our tongues. When date retrieval is unpredictable. In my long career, I held numerous editorial posts but, like Joe Biden, I couldn’t tell you offhand what years I did what. Often, when telling a long-ago story, I’m happy just to get the decade right. On a harried call recently, a bank asked me for my address. I blanked and had to call a lifeline, my wife in the next room.

It’s also true that the other day I called our youngest son, Tyler, by the name of our oldest son, Blair. I hate when that happens, but I trust that both of my sons understand I know the difference between them. Not that it matters; neither son gets back to my emails promptly enough, as far as I am concerned.

I like pundit Jeff Greenfield’s suggestion for a special edition of “Jeopardy” for the forgetful. The idea is to answer a clue when you can’t think of a name, for example, Winston Churchill. The correct answer, Greenfield suggests, would be, “Who was the fat bald guy who smoked cigars and made a ‘V’ sign with his fingers?” I’d watch.

Knowing too much

Memory slips, I maintain, are a poor indication of mental decline. Misremembering, misstating, misnaming, it happens to us all as we age. If you’re a normal, maturing individual, it’s the tradeoff for accumulated wisdom. That’s right, kids, I’m saying we elders know too much. We need to make space.

Science backs me up. University of California neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, writing in The New York Times, says that as we age, our crowded prefrontal cortex gets stressed, and we tend to get more “distractible.” But he argues that the kind of forgetting that Biden is being dinged about is not essential to a demanding leadership job. He writes, “Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of the country.” What is important? “Knowledge of the relevant facts and emotional regulation — both of which … might even improve with age.”

I leave it for another argument, and the vast universe of Trump cognitive-state coverage, to seriously start down the road on Trump’s mental state. Does a former president who touted bleach for COVID, who never reads a book and who skipped CIA briefings for golf outings have “knowledge of relevant facts”? Do his rally riffs, or his up-to-200-a-day postings about “enemies of the people” or “poisoning the blood” — not to mention the ketchup bottles smashed on White House walls — indicate “emotional regulation”? More on this, alas, in the endless year to come.

For now I wonder about the Biden side, and how the media will continue to treat him. A growing posse of liberal pundits now urge too-old Joe Biden to step aside, possibly throw the convention open. I wrote a few months back, “Hell No, Joe, Don’t Go,” and I stand by it. As of now, an unknown is too big a risk. Biden doesn’t have to keep it together for five years, just till November. By then the Trump menace, at least in the Oval Office, will have passed. Kamala Harris still hasn’t carved out a constituency, but she wouldn’t run the country into the Mariana Trench, as Trump threatens to do.

As to the mortal danger Harris supposedly represents to Democratic turnout, I don’t buy that, either. She’s competent, not spotlighted enough by the Biden Administration, but mostly, it’s the media that give her spotty coverage. After the death of Alexander Navalny, our century’s most tragic and inspiring profile in courage, VP Harris was on the spot, at the Munich Security Conference. She delivered a forceful, stirring speech about Navalny that had the Europeans on their feet. Little major coverage here that I saw. I had to search hard to find clips online.

Meantime, in about the same timeframe, Trump did the following: denounced his fines totaling more than $400 million for sexual assault, defamation and business fraud; followed that up days later by holding up for sale his new gold-colored MAGA sneakers, retailing for $399; and, after a week of saying nothing, reacted to the death of Navalny by saying his trials made him Navalny. Without a pause, Trump then went straight to a right-wing conference, which opened with a call for an “end to democracy,” denouncing AARP as “evil.” For just those few days, you couldn’t dream up a more Adderall-fueled schedule, or a more demented script.

But everyone knows who got coverage and who didn’t. It’s no longer “If it bleeds, it leads.” It’s “If you shock, you will rock.”

Sometimes I think Trump must be the luckiest narcissist who ever lived. There’ve been others, certainly. Caesar, who summed up his conquest of Gaul with the catchy “Vini, vidi, vici.” (“I came, I saw, I conquered.”) Corsican-born Bonaparte, snatching the emperor’s crown from the pope to crown himself. But those fellows had limited contemporary media. Some scribes, historians, a few painters. Pure narcissism demands an endless cataract of adulation to be pumped into a gasping ego. Trump, uniquely, was born at the right time. What must it be like for the one-time construction guy from Queens to be welded, permanently piped, into every device on earth? All eager to retransmit his next attention-seeking missile, as he gulps down the world’s attention, in real time? Always turning up the dial up a notch, needing more, getting it. A narcissist nirvana. With delusion a lead-pipe cinch.

Hiding in plain sight

There’s a debate among Biden’s people about whether to push him into more news conferences and media appearances. The theory is that just as we normalized Trump’s ceaseless torrent of insults and gibberish through constant exposure, people will normalize Biden’s endless gaffes, and the media will then move along.

Or, the other argument goes, Biden should be protected from unscripted appearances, swaddled. Don’t explain, let the press complain.

I can see both points of view. The swaddle scenario isn’t automatically wrong. In 1944, a visibly sick and terminal Franklin Roosevelt was successfully shielded from too many campaign appearances, with the argument that he was too important, Hitler had to be stopped. When FDR died, just a few months later into his fourth term, his unknown vice president, former haberdasher Harry Truman, took over without incident.

For you Kamala catcallers, here’s what happened. The undistinguished Harry wrapped up World War II, planned a post-war peace with Churchill and Stalin, gero, ordered up the Marshall Plan, desegregated the military, ran the Berlin Airlift and fought the Chinese and North Koreans to a draw..

Not bad for a vice president no one had heard of. Don’t judge a book by its coverage.

The end’s in sight

This much I know from lived experience: When it comes to men, especially men in their late 70s and 80s, nothing’s certain. A serious health event, physical or mental, could still alter this campaign. It can be reassuring to know we still have escape hatches if the worse happens. Open conventions are theoretically possible, and late-in-the-campaign switches have happened before.

But a man 78 to 81 years of age can be expected to live 7 to 10 years more. The odds of diagnosable dementia get higher each year, but they’re not overwhelming — that is, over 50% — until one reaches one’s mid-80s. So, sticking with the odds, the chances are overwhelming that the contest, and its combatants, are already set.

I think we’ve just got to accept that watching two old men clash in our gladiator arena is our destiny this year. I believe in my betting heart that in the end, the American people will choose the gladiator who shows mercy over the one who promises retribution. But it will have to play itself out. As those of us with experience know, sometimes the only way to get through something hard is to try to relax and watch the show, even if it’s a blood sport. And try to remember where you parked your chariot.

By the way, “Gladiator II” is going to be released this fall. Russell Crowe, who played Maximus in “Gladiator” back in 2000, won’t be in it. He, ah, stepped aside rather than seek a role in the sequel. The release date, Nov. 22, is one to ponder. Our past, our present and our make-pretend will crisscross. It’s the date John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. It will be just two weeks after our 2024 election. Will there be a concession speech by that date? Or will one gladiator be scowling, refusing to leave the Colosseum, his thumb pointed down? Threatening carnage, vowing to bring down the empire?

When in ancient Rome, friends. Don’t panic. Thumbs up.

Guest columnist Barry Golson covers the Tampa Bay senior scene. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Forbes and AARP. He is the author of “Gringos in Paradise” (Scribner). Contact him at gbarrygolson@gmail.com.