Some of my favourite leaders are elders: Queen Elizabeth II, Iris Apfel, Colonel Sanders. ‘Granfluencers’ are all over the socials, from TikTok’s 93-year-old Grandma Droniak to Insta’s Baddie Winkle. And when it comes to cutting a dash, it’s senior citizen chic that put the ‘old’ into old skool. Classic hip hop style — track suits, chunky kicks and visor sunglasses — is straight outta bingo.
Codgers are cool, but try telling Americans surveying their options for the 2024 presidential race. Polls show concern about the putative nominees’ advanced ages: 80 for Democrat Joe Biden, 77 for Republican Donald Trump. The idea that the next leader of the free world would be settling into his Oval Office recliner at the same point other oldsters are being duped by phone scammers is enough to make voters neck a laxative.
But according to a 2020 study in the Journal on Active Aging, both men are classed as ‘super-agers’, with mental and physical functions intact into late life. Biden’s predicted life expectancy is a whopping 96.8 years, but given that Trump eats a colon fossilising diet of Big Macs and burnt steaks, it’s hard to see him making it to his projected 88.6 years.
And as for those mental functions: a recent interview with right-wing popinjay Tucker Carlson featured Trump’s free jazz riff on ‘vicious mosquitos’ and water, which ‘comes out of heaven’. Going full Mean Girls, Trump threw in some body shaming, saying Biden ‘looks terrible on the beach… like he’s walking on toothpicks’. Toothpicks aside, Biden is visibly more fit, and although his remarks might be studded with folksy curiosities such as ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’, at least he’s coherent.
And with zero felony charges against him to Trump’s 91, he’s not getting fitted for an ankle monitor any time soon.
But youth doesn’t negate brainworms, as evidenced by Republican wannabe nominee Ron DeSantis, a 45-year-old whippersnapper known for his Chat GPT-grade charisma. The Florida governor recently brought the yikes with his defence of his state’s schools’ rebranding of slavery as a glorified apprenticeship. According to him, under slavery ‘some of the folks eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life’.
Surely a tick in the yes column for any Werther’s-sucking commander in chief has to be the presumption of a faded sex drive. I’m still rattled after last month’s viral video of congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s performance in the audience of a Denver theatre. Later blaming her ‘overtly animated personality’, Boebert is seen with her male companion vigorously pulling focus from Beetlejuice the musical with their frottage festival in Row E. Not to yuck their yum, but I like my politicians dealing with affairs of state, not of pants.
A few years back, former president Jimmy Carter reasoned that at 80, he wouldn’t have been able to handle White House responsibilities. Still truckin’ at 99, I think Carter’s just being coy. You may well ask if America can even find a presidential candidate under 70. But as a certain Democratic presidential nominee might have it: ‘Why would it want to, you lying dog-faced pony soldier?’
