Joe Biden’s age apparently isn’t an issue for Donald Trump

Former President Donald Trump doesn’t have an issue with Joe Biden’s age according to comments he made during an interview on The Megyn Kelly Show. Instead, he thinks the President is just “grossly incompetent.”

While speaking with Megyn Kelly, the former president was likely attempting to separate his own advanced age from Biden’s when he ranted about the difference between being too old to hold office versus just being too incompetent for it.

“Age is interesting because some people are very sharp, and some people do lose it, but you lose it at 40 and 50, also,” Trump explained to Kelly according to The Hill. “But no, he’s not too old at all,” Trump said about Biden. “He’s grossly incompetent.”

Biden is already the oldest serving American President at the age of 80. But if he were to defeat the Republican candidate in the 2024 election then Biden would not leave the Oval Office until he was 86, assuming nothing happened. 

Trump himself isn’t far behind Biden at 77 years old but there does seem to be a major difference in how the two men are portrayed in the media. Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik recently wrote he worried coverage of Biden’s age could get Trump reelected. 

“The consequence of the press' fixation on the issue of Biden's age despite his evident capability for governing is that public opinion will be skewed in Trump's favor,” he wrote, though he added some Republicans have been questioning Trump’s fitness for office. 

This may be why Trump really tried to dispel the myth that Biden was too old to lead the American people since he would be about the same age Biden is now if he were to win the next election and step into a second term in office. 

The former president made it a point to say that some world leaders were still sharp well into their 90s when Kelly asked if Americans should be concerned about age and then whipped out a personal anecdote about his friend Bernie who was still sharp as a tack. 

“I have friends, Bernie Marcus, that are in their 90s and they’re sharp as a tack. They’re just, I mean, I would say just about what they used to be,” Trump noted, later insinuating that it was not age but rather incompetence that Americans should worry about. 

Pictured: Bernie Marcus / Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

“You look at some of the great world leaders,” Trump continued. “They were in their 80s and they did, I mean, Churchill, so many people, they were phenomenal in their 80s,” he added—though nearly half of Americans say Trump isn’t mentally up for the job either. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

Results from a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 46% of Americans didn’t think Trump was mentally up for the job of the president compared to 36% who thought the same of Biden, a finding the former president said was “rigged” during a rant on Truth Social.

“In a phony and probably rigged Wall Street Journal poll, coming out of nowhere to softened the mental incompetence blow that is so obvious with Crooked Joe Biden, they ask about my age and mentality. Where did that come from?” Trump questioned according to Newsweek. 

The Wall Street Journal poll also found that 47% thought Trump was too old to seek a  second term in office while an overwhelming majority—77% of respondents—believed that Biden was too old to seek a second term.

Interestingly, two-thirds of Democrats responded that Biden was too old for office, which reinforces the idea that many of the party’s loyalists are ready for a change at the top of the ticket when it comes to the 2024 election.

Whether or not those Democrats will vote for Biden on election day has yet to be seen, but it’s clear voters really aren’t enthusiastic about either Biden or Trump's advanced age, something the Democratic pollster Michael Bocian told the Wall Street Journal. 

“Voters are looking for change, and neither of the leading candidates is the change that they’re looking for,” Bocian, who conducted the Wall Street Journal poll with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, said to the news agency’s Sabrina Siddiqui and Catherine Lucey.