WASHINGTON – When President Biden leaves Tuesday night for a four-day change for the Middle East, he will probably be more rested than he would have been if he had followed the original plan.
The trip was initially hooked on another trip last month to Europe, which would have involved an arduous 10-day trip abroad until Mr Biden’s team made it clear that this prolonged trip could be unnecessarily taxing for them. to a 79-year-old president. , or “crazy,” as one official put it.
Aides also cited political and diplomatic reasons for reorganizing the additional stops as a separate trip weeks later. But the reality is that managing the agenda of the oldest president in U.S. history presents different challenges. And as Mr Biden insists he plans to run for a second term, his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party.
Just a year and a half after his first term, Mr. Biden is already more than a year older than Ronald Reagan at the end of two terms. If he runs another campaign in 2024, Mr Biden would ask the country to elect a leader who would be 86 at the end of his term, testing the outer limits of age and presidency. Polls show that many Americans consider Mr. Biden too old, and some Democratic strategists believe he should not run again.
Not surprisingly, it is a sensitive subject in the west wing. In interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and others not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers reported uniformly that Mr. Biden remained intellectually committed, asking intelligent questions. Meeting meetings, asking assistants about points in disputes, calling them late. at night, picking up that weak spot on page 14 of a note and rewriting speeches like her abortion statement on Friday until the last minute.
But they acknowledged that Mr Biden looks bigger than he did just a few years ago, a political responsibility that cannot be resolved with traditional White House ploys such as staff changes or new communication plans. His energy level, while impressive to a man his age, is not what it used to be, and some helpers take care of it in silence. He often stirs when he walks, and helpers worry about him tripping over a cable. He stumbles upon the words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he gets to the end without a gaffe.
While White House officials insist they do not make special adaptations as Reagan’s team did, they privately try to protect Mr. Biden’s weekends in Delaware as much as possible. He is usually a president five or five and a half days a week, although he is called at any time regardless of the day needed. He stays out of public view at night and has participated in less than half of press conferences or interviews than his previous predecessors.
When Mr. Biden fell while riding a bicycle last month, White House officials sadly realized it was one of the most important stories of the week, no matter how much the president trains five mornings a week. , often with a physical trainer, or that many men his age hardly ride a bike.
Biden himself has said questions about his fitness are reasonable, though he assures Americans he is in good shape. Even for some fans, though, the question is whether this will last another six years.
The presidency of Biden
With the midterm elections approaching, this is where President Biden is.
“I think it’s inappropriate to look for that position after the age of 80 or 80,” said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents. “I have just turned 80 and I have discovered that for the last two or three years I think it would not have been prudent for me to try to run any organization. You are not as sharp as before. “
Everyone ages differently, of course, and some experts place Mr. Biden in a category of “super-ages” who stay unusually fit as they get older.
“Right now, there is no evidence that Biden’s age should import an ounce,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studied the age of candidates in 2020. “If people don’t like their policies, they don’t like what they say, okay, they can vote for another. But it has nothing to do with how old they are.”
Still, Professor Olshansky said it was legitimate to wonder if this would continue like this at 86 years old. “That’s the right question to ask,” he said. “You can’t sweeten aging. Things are going badly as we get older and the risks increase as we get older. “
The White House rejected the idea that Mr. Biden was anything other than a commander in seven days. “President Biden works every day and because CEOs can perform their duties from anywhere in the world, it’s long been common for them to spend weekends outside the White House,” said Andrew Bates, secretary of attached press, after this article was published. published online.
The president’s medical report in November indicated that he had atrial fibrillation but was stable and asymptomatic. “Mr. Biden’s outpatient walk is noticeably stiffer and less fluid than a year or so ago,” the report said, and gastroesophageal reflux makes him cough and clear his throat, symptoms that “certainly seem to be more frequent and more pronounced “. . ”
But overall, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s doctor, declared him “a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old man who is fit to successfully serve as president.”
However, questions about Mr Biden’s physical condition have affected his public position. In a June poll by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll, 64% of voters believed they were proving they were too old to be president, including 60% of respondents age 65 or older.
Mr. Biden’s public appearances have fueled this perception. His speeches can be flat and muted. Sometimes he loses his mind, has trouble naming names, or appears momentarily confused. More than once, he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “President Harris.” Mr. Biden, who overcame a childish stutter, stumbles upon words like “kleptocracy.” He has said Iranian when referring to the Ukrainian and has repeatedly called Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, “John,” confusing him with the late Republican senator of that Virginia name.
Republicans and conservative media happily highlight these moments, posting viral videos, sometimes exaggerated or distorted to make Mr. Biden look even worse. But the White House has had to back down some of its impromptu comments, such as when it promised a military response if China attacks Taiwan or declared that President Vladimir V. Putin “cannot remain in power” in Russia.
Mr. Biden was famously prone to goggles even when he was a younger man, and helpers point out his marathon meetings with families of victims of mass shootings or his work with the rope during a trip to Cleveland last week as a test of endurance.
Mike Donilon, a senior advisor who started working for Biden about 40 years ago, said he saw no change. “On the way back from long journeys when staff are removed, you will want to spend four hours planning how we will start with domestic politics, when all the much younger staff want to do is sleep,” he said.
Mr. Biden is not the first president to face age issues. The issue came up repeatedly under President Donald J. Trump, who is four years younger. The reduced vocabulary of Mr. Trump, the tendency to meander, sometimes inconsistent remarks, light office hours, and struggles to process information led critics to conclude that he was in decline.
Until now, the oldest president was Reagan. When a bad debate performance in 1984 briefly threatened his re-election, he recovered at his next meeting joking that he would not exploit “my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
“Reagan understood this problem, as intuitively as he had thought,” said biographer Lou Cannon. “And he told me, ‘Age will be a problem if I get old and it won’t be if I don’t.’
In Reagan’s last years, a new set of aides secretly assessed whether he might have to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment’s disability clause, but eventually concluded that he was still fit. (Five years after leaving the White House, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.)
Still, the aides tried to limit her schedule, heavily guarded by First Lady Nancy Reagan. “That was one of the first lessons we had, not to exaggerate,” recalled Tom Griscom, one of those assistants. They should also not send excessive information documents at night. “After a couple of weeks,” he said, “he returned a message from Mrs. Reagan asking us not to send so much at night because he would read it all,” staying awake until late.
Mr Biden’s advisers say he resists this management and pushes in the other direction. “He’s pushing for additions to his schedule all the time, whether it’s calls from new CEOs or evening meetings with members,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the deputy chief of staff overseeing her schedule.
But helpers are careful when exposing it to the coronavirus. Assistants are tested once a week and wear colored bracelets on test day; if they plan to attend a meeting with the president another day, they will also have to try on this morning and wear N95 masks.
The White House seems equally determined to protect Mr. Biden from unscripted interactions with the media. He has held only 16 press conferences since taking office, less than half of those held by Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush at this stage and less than a third of those of Bill Clinton and George HW Bush. , according to Martha. Joynt Kumar, a scholar of presidential media strategy.
Likewise, Mr. Biden has granted only 38 interviews, far fewer than Mr. Trump (116), Mr. Obama (198), Mr. Bush (71), Mr. Clinton (75), and the …