Joe Biden is very old. He was born closer to the Battle of Gettysburg than the 2024 election. He was an adult before the JFK assassination and a senator before the fall of Saigon. And it shows.
The 81-year-old president was never a pristine public speaker; he’s also struggled with a stutter for much of his life. But in recent years, Biden’s oratory has grown increasingly stilted and slurred, his gaffes more frequent. He recently referred to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as Helmut Kohl (who left the German government in 1998) and Emmanuel Macron as François Mitterrand (who has not been the president of France since 1995).
Shortly after these slips, special counsel Robert Hur released his report on Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. Hur acknowledged that there was no strong case for prosecuting Biden — unlike Donald Trump, he promptly returned all classified documents in his possession upon the Justice Department’s request. But the report also made many editorial comments about the president’s cognitive capacities. It referred to Biden’s “faulty memory” and “diminished faculties,” and it claimed that he “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Hur is a veteran of the conservative legal movement, and most liberals saw his knocks on Biden’s mental acuity as pure political opportunism. But it nevertheless reinforced the public’s preexisting perception that Biden is too old for his job.
The notion that Biden is less mentally fit for the presidency than Trump is extremely dubious. The president has been involved in public policy for more than half a century and Biden has almost certainly forgotten more about geopolitics and the federal bureaucracy than Trump has ever learned. Age notwithstanding, Biden remains far more cognitively qualified for the presidency than his 77-year-old rival, whose ignorance of (and incuriosity about) the details of federal policy has been…
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