I turn 78 this month, the same age as Donald Trump. He celebrated his 78th birthday two months ago with a giant MAGA cake and a speech to a large crowd in West Palm Beach, Florida.
There will be no celebration of my birthday and there will certainly be no jokes about Joe Biden like there were with Trump.
A few months can make a big difference. When Trump celebrated in a convention center, Joe Biden was his opponent, Kamala Harris was just running for vice president, and Trump had not yet chosen a vice president. He also narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.
Biden is still president, but Harris is getting most of the attention because she is now the Democratic presidential nominee and has just announced her running mate.
I can tell you that 78 is old. That’s not much younger than 81, which is Biden’s age. But Biden and Trump are worlds apart.
Biden is weak. Democrats have lost confidence in his ability to beat Trump and serve a full term, at the end of which he would be 85 years old.
Trump is not as forceful as he once was, but he exudes confidence and has an agenda that makes people believe he could finish one term, retire and let his vice president, 40-year-old JD Vance, lead the MAGA revolution to future victories.
In reality, Biden was unlucky and Trump was lucky.
Many people at age 78 are not in the best shape mentally or physically. Many people at age 81 are in good shape, and there are others who are over 90. This is largely a question of genetics.
However, these people do not have what it takes to be president, and Trump knows it. Many voters felt that both candidates were too old to govern the country and would have welcomed replacements from the next generation.
Neither candidate was willing to back down, but in the end one of them did so and the other doubled his bet.
I am impressed by how Trump is exploiting every moment of the election campaign to gain every advantage.
He continues to plot and scheme, lie incessantly, be two-faced, say something and then take it back, be deliberately ambiguous, call others names, and come up with new dog whistles for the racists and misogynists in his base. Whatever.
In public, he always puts on a show for the MAGA supporters, even when he can’t squeeze a single additional Republican vote out of the audience. He can mix up names as much as Biden did in their debate without Republican supporters calling him out on it. He gets away with it because he tells his fans he is their retribution against the “elites.”
I think Harris has a fair chance to win, but so does Trump. So let’s say Trump wins in the Electoral College and then turns 79 on June 14th of next year, 80 in 2026, 81 in 2027, and 82 in 2028, which happens to be a presidential election year.
And let’s say Trump loses his mind at some point. I bet we’d never know. He’d lie about it. His doctors would lie for him. He wouldn’t release his medical records. His staff would cover for him.
And he would simply retract the statement he made at his birthday rally in June: “Our country is being destroyed by incompetent people … All presidents should go through aptitude tests.”
NED BRISTOL, a retired editor of the Sun Chronicle, writes columns for the newspaper. You can reach him at [email protected].
