The former chairman of the Republican Party turned the tables on Donald Trump’s long-running criticsm of Joe Biden and suggested it’s now the president-elect who may be “too old” to hold his own — especially against his new “best buddy” Elon Musk.
Michael Steele hit out amid lawmakers’ harsh rebukes of Trump after the tech billionaire appeared to play a major role earlier this week via X to kill the first bipartisan stopgap government funding deall floated by Republican House speaker Mike Johnson.
Trump issued a statement agreeing with his billionaire backer only after Musk launched the initial attacks, leading some to mock Trump as Musk’s obsequious vice president.
Steele took his shot on MSNBC’s The Weekend on Saturday with program co-host Symone Sanders Townsend when she wondered what had happened to the hard-driving Trump of his reality TV show.
“Where is the Donald Trump from The Apprentice?” she asked “The man talking about hired, fired, hired, fired, you go. The Donald Trump I thought the people elected — not me but the other people — he’s the one that would usually like to lay down the law and be clear about where he stands.”
Steele interjected: “Maybe he’s too old for the job now.”
“He is aging,” Sanders Townsend responded.
Trump, 78, has repeatedly pummeled Biden over the years as a doddering old man, even though the president is only four years older than the president-elect.
It’s Trump who will become the oldest president in U.S. history. Some of his behavior in the past years already raised concerns among critics about his continuined competence as he heads into his 80s in the White House.
During his last administration Trump referred to airports during America’s Revolutionary War. He has flubbed locations he’s in and identies of people (including “Leon” Musk), slurred words and spent the large part of what was supposed to be a question-and-answer campaign appearance in October instead swaying to music.
Congress finally approved a government spending bill Friday only a few hours before a midnight deadline that would have shut down the government before Christmas. The bill to fund the government through mid-March was the third attempt within two days to avert a shutdown, afer Musk and Trump ordered the first one scrapped, and the second package went down to defeat.
Trump pushed for, but failed to win, a lifting of the debt ceiling as part of the funding deal, even though he has vowed to cut, not increase, government debt.
He has tapped Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to target what Musk has vowed will be some $1 trillion in funds. But Trump at the same time has also prioritized more tax cuts in his second term, which tax experts say could add another $4 trillion to the U.S. debt over the next decade.
