President Biden moves more slowly than when he was vice president under former President Barack Obama. He squints slightly when looking at the teleprompter and sometimes misspeaks anyway.
Before taking office, Biden suffered a minor injury in a fall (the transition office said at the time that he tripped while playing with his dog). Since then, he has yet to hold a solo press conference. Reporters are sometimes shooed away at his public events, where his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, or aides can be seen pointing him in the right direction.
In a recent speech, Biden appeared confused about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s name. “I want to thank Sec- … the former general … I keep calling him ‘General,’” the president said of the retired Army four-star officer. “My … The guy who runs that outfit over there.” It was reminiscent of Biden’s election-year flub of the Declaration of Independence.
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The fact-checking website Snopes gave the commander in chief a conditional pass on the Austin incident. “It’s unclear whether Biden literally ‘forgot’ his defense secretary’s name at that moment or whether, for example, he got stuck doing an extended ‘folksy’ ad lib after initially tripping over his words,” reads its verdict.
Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years and was vice president for eight, has been known for verbal miscues for decades. Aides often point out that he had a speech impediment, overcoming a childhood stuttering problem. But at 78, he is also the oldest man to ever serve as president, beating out Ronald Reagan, whose second term ended a couple of weeks before his 78th birthday.
“We were worried he had lost a step,” said a Democratic strategist, recalling Biden’s initial listless performances in the primary debates. “But the voters answered this question in the primaries. They answered it again in November.”
Republicans did raise the age issue against Biden in the campaign, though often elliptically. Former President Donald Trump called him “Sleepy Joe,” a reprise of his defining nicknames such as “Low Energy” Jeb Bush and “Crooked” Hillary Clinton. “Hidin’ Biden” was derided for waging a “basement campaign” with few, often sparsely attended events.
The idea was to contrast Trump’s stamina with Biden’s, as both were senior citizens at heightened risk of COVID-19. The Trump team could simultaneously raise questions about Biden’s physical energy, mental acuity, and transparency with the public. “Joe Biden’s current campaign strategy: hide from the press and avoid the campaign trail at all costs,” said a Republican National Committee spokesman back when Biden had gone 76 days without a press conference.
A Washington Examiner/YouGov poll released less than a month before the election found that 60% registered voters were very or fairly concerned about Biden’s age versus 45% who said the same about the 74-year-old Trump. Nearly 40% of Democrats worried Biden might be too old, in addition to 61% of independents.
But the age strategy had its limits. Polls showed Trump underperforming among senior citizens, a group he had easily won in 2016, and some Republican operatives urged him to abandon it. “I worried it was killing us,” said one. The Biden camp also turned the basement jibes against the GOP, arguing it proved the party’s nominee was handling the coronavirus responsibly, while Trump was holding “superspreader” events and even contracted the virus himself.
The concerns were nevertheless shared across party lines, such as by Obama’s Biden-voting former personal physician. “Biden made me nervous,” Dr. David Scheiner told the Washington Examiner in 2019. “Harris started attacking him, and he looked frail to me. I sort of got the feeling he wasn’t very strong.” Scheiner likened it to the uneven performance by Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller in front of Congress, which was also widely attributed to age.
Nor have the whispers gone away since Biden assumed the presidency, especially after Harris has conducted solo telephone calls with multiple world leaders. “I pray for the president’s health and hope that he is in complete control of his faculties,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “I worry that he may not be, and I am worried that his successor would be a disaster were he forced to abdicate his throne. I think the public is already aware of it and most likely shares my concerns.”
Harris, 56, was chosen as Biden’s running mate, in part, to address age-related worries about the top of the Democratic ticket. The president’s main opponent in last year’s Democratic primaries, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was even older.
“He will hold a solo press conference, but I don’t have a date for you at this point in time,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki assured reporters last month. “Not this week,” she added in response to a follow-up. “No.” It did not happen in the following weeks either.
Reagan faced age-related questions throughout his eight years in office. He once addressed Samuel Pierce, his secretary of housing and urban development, as “mayor” at an event. But he survived an assassination attempt in 1981 and appeared to put the issue to rest during a debate in his 1984 reelection bid. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he famously quipped. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
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Yet, former White House chief of staff Howard Baker did later report there was discussion of invoking the 25th Amendment during Reagan’s second term, a provision for removing a president who is unable to discharge his duties. Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years after leaving office. This was a perennial topic of discussion under Trump as well, with detractors wondering if the former reality TV star suffered dementia.
“The president is an older man,” said the Democratic strategist. “But for now, this is just a Republican talking point.”
