On Joe’s Age

Former president Biden should rest. He has done enough.

I am not a Joe Biden hater; I look at his leadership of America out of the disastrous first Trump era and through the pandemic very fondly. I would wear a T-shirt of Mr. Biden’s face in aviators, sneering at the public which surrendered the country to oligarchs and fascists: “Miss me yet?” I will sell such a shirt eventually. Until Sunday, May 19, 2025, I had planned to write: “But that day will not come if President Biden and his family do not retire for a longer spell. At this time, I am quite wroth with them,” but I have had to recalibrate this reflection on account of his prostate cancer diagnosis and the recent passing of Rep. Gerry Connolly.

This does not mean I think we ought to put this analysis aside out of compassion. President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which is a health-and-wealth destroying nightmare that has already tanked the country’s final perfect credit rating, Moody’s and precipitated yet another stock market crashout, passed the House by a single vote, 215 to 214, with one Republican voting present and two members absent. There has been much frustration that this could have been averted if only three elderly Democrats (Rep. Sylvester Turner, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, and Rep. Gerry Connolly) had not died since January 2025.

I have followed the former president’s career for most of my life, and I hardly recognized the old man of 2024. The Joe Biden I knew was called “Diamond Joe;” he was a cool, goofy guy who had a temper, made gaffes, and was played by Jason Sudeikis on Saturday Night Live (see: Everyone Who Has Played Joe Biden on SNL). When reporting suggested that Mr. Biden would rage and swear at his subordinates, I thought: “That’s my Joe.” That vitality has since been drained, which is a flaw of nature, not character. Time is unkind to old men, and they cannot prevail against it. It is fact, not morning news cliché, that the presidency ages its officeholders at an accelerated rate. Why, then, did Mr. Biden insist he would stay on, instead of going to a deserved rest?

Mr. Biden’s diagnosis could not have come at a more unfortunate time—in the middle of CNN scold Jake Tapper’s tour of every news podcast in the country promoting his new gossip book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. I listened to it on Audible.com without much pleasure—while I had intended to review it, this is another instance where the “advance looks” and press appearances around a book already exhausted all its interesting factoids before it was on the shelves. I ought to start demanding advance copies like everybody else.

“Was Joe Biden old?” This is not a novel question; you, as I, are sick of hearing or thinking about this insane folly masquerading as dignity. It is stale, irritating, and infuriating in similar measures, but every new revelation that Mr. Biden’s staff was concerned he may need to be equipped with a wheelchair or that they were scheduling around his reduced operating hours while insisting he was at the peak of his capability makes me want to book an overnight Accela to New York, barge onto the Morning Joe set, sit down on the couch, and give Bidenworld a tongue lashing.

I resent profoundly that I was made complicit in what Mr. Tapper calls the Biden “cover-up.” As the president hobbled on camera, I confidently told my peers that with his early morning exercise routines, Mr. Biden was “in better shape than me!” I recognized, too smugly, that Mr. Biden’s abilities in the day-to-day duties of the office were separate from glad-handing and campaigning, so I could excuse the diminishment of the “trivial” and cosmetic parts of the job. This was a fatal error.

What I took for granted was that his staff would not engage in wholesale glamoury. Mr. Biden notoriously took his oath of office on an injured ankle instead of wearing the boot as the doctor prescribed, causing a worsening gait that plagued his whole term and created the same elderly appearance he sought to avoid. His staff restricted media and Cabinet access to the president, gave him teleprompters even for fundraisers, and otherwise kept the former president’s “bad days” away from the camera while also manipulating the primary calendar so that he would not be credibly challenged, which presumably drove former Democratic presidential primary candidate and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insane. They painted a misleading portraiture, which I foolishly took for realism and showed my own readers.

Even after the June debate, when the talking point came down from the Party that Mr. Biden “had a cold,” I wrote the following to an anxious Democratic donor, who has not let me live it down: “I see no reason to assume that performance was not a one-off; after all, it would be implausible that they would schedule that for 9:00 Prime Time if they expected to do badly. I am prepared to offer Mr. Biden a pass—so long as this does not happen again, and next time, he studies more carefully!”

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

Senator John McCain, hero that he was, was frequently absent from Washington and unable to fulfill the responsibilities of his office while receiving treatment for glioblastoma. Senator Edward Kennedy, battling brain cancer, likewise spent much of his final term absent from the Senate. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s last months in office publicly battling dementia were senseless given that her retirement would not have risked the Party’s control of the seat; California law guaranteed her replacement would be a Democrat. Rep. Kay Granger, Republican from Texas, was found by her local paper in a memory care facility after months of missed votes.

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

Senator John Fetterman stands out because he is both the model for transparency and in-office meltdown. After winning his Senate race in 2022, he suffered a stroke that left him with auditory processing issues, requiring closed captioning displays as an accommodation to participate in interviews and Senate proceedings. He checked himself into Walter Reed for depression treatment, which seemed unheard of for an elected official. In fact, President Walker on the Netflix adaptation of House of Cards was impeached for lying about using antidepressant medication.

But by all accounts, the senator still has some problems: recent reporting shows him crashing his car, shouting “Why does everyone hate me?” and hitting his desk during a meeting with representatives from the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the National Education Association, buying a gun and isolating himself from longtime staff—his legislative assistants, as well as former chief of staff, communications aides, and legislative director have all resigned within the last year and a half.

I know it is unseemly and inappropriate, but the elder Millennial inside me has to be restrained from comparing this part of his career to the infamous video of Britney Spears, newly shorn, bashing a paparazzo’s Ford Explorer with an umbrella.

In some ways, I think we have created a political culture where the appearance of wellness matters more than real fitness. The consequence is that, by reducing accommodation and avoiding delegation, our leaders end up performing worse than if they had accepted their condition.

I am not immune to this pathology. On my old beat, when I had bosses I wanted to impress, my work ethic was that of a ’90s comic book antihero. “Does whatever it takes to get the job done” was the highlight of one of my performance reviews. Around that time, I was also afflicted by walking pneumonia for two months before I thought to see a doctor.

I understand how Mr. Biden ended up in this pickle. Less so his wife and son, who ostensibly care about him, or his staff, who must have understood they share in his legacy. Mr. Biden’s partisans could have spared themselves humiliation—and the nation its authoritarian collapse and credit downgrading—had they chosen what was plainly the easier road: let the 82-year-old man retire.

The real sin of this choice is that it serves no end but defeat and disgrace. Mr. Biden did not preserve his dignity by declining retirement until the last possible moment—he sacrificed it. In return, we won no victories, and the country is starting to resemble a stock fiction dystopia, where immigrants are snatched off the streets by masked government agents, where the press’s freedom is threatened, where sitting members of Congress and judges are indicted, where insurrectionists are celebrated and paid. America may never recover the cost of this one family’s vanity.

His staff, too, are rewarded for their loyalty by having their names recorded in books about their failures, so we can be assured they will answer for this throughout the rest of their careers. But I am less sympathetic to them than I am to myself—a mere satirist with an “I’m Ridin’ with Biden” bumper sticker still half-peeled on my car—because I will also have to engage in conversations about Mr. Biden’s acuity for years to come. Every Democrat who so much as looks at the public will be pushed or challenged on this topic—which is the sole reason I am writing about it at all when the Qatar Force One scandal is far more interesting, funny, and topical. I feel like I must be “on the record” sooner than later to preserve my credibility.

To be clear, I am not inclined to treat the Party as a whole as a bunch of Machiavellians and liars. I have met too many of our loyal partisans who are fighting for genuine causes. But I think we have lost too much of the benefit of the doubt to be granted the assumption of honesty.

Caveat: These are not my beliefs, but ones I hear constantly from my Zoomer fans and readers. In 2016, voters were convinced they personally read Wikileak-ed emails that proved the Democratic National Committee rigged that primary against Senator Bernie Sanders. (A conflict I took no stance on; my primary darling was former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who I thought was an impressive guitarist.) I also read those e-mails and saw no smoking gun, but those progressives are absolutely sure they saw it in black and white, and I cannot convince someone against what they perceive as their lived experience.

Then, in 2020, when several establishment candidates consolidated behind Mr. Biden, those same people took that maneuvering as confirmation that “the fix was in,” and that a shadowy DNC Illuminatus was again hindering Mr. Sanders and depriving “the people” of their much-needed Medicare For All. (I was an ardent champion of Senator Elizabeth Warren in this race.)

It does not matter if this is provably true, inferred, or delusional—this attitude has become so common in standup comedy, on Twitch, on Reddit threads, YouTube comments, Discord servers, whatever—that Mr. Biden’s nomination without participating in a single primary debate, subsequent withdrawal, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket were seen as the third time in a row that the Democratic Party burned its activist base. Again, this is not my view—but this narrative is pervasive enough that Democrats must be sensitive to avoid further agitation.

This marks the ninth month since Mr. Biden withdrew from the race. Since then, we have had to hear about his frailty every fucking day—perhaps the press could take some time, too, to explore the fact that the current president, Mr. Trump, is a degenerate lunatic. A vegetable would be preferable as a leader to the Mandarin Mussolini. But I suppose it was a bridge too far to expect cable news to have the good faith to draw that distinction.

We should ask: If Mr. Biden were elected to a second term as president and had this diagnosis today, would he have chosen to step down? Would his staff and handlers have announced it to the public at all? And perhaps a more interesting question—more relevant, anyway: if Mr. Trump had that same cancer, would he give up power to receive medical treatment? It seems doubtful to me.

If concealing your real condition is a sin, then Mr. Trump will be damned, too. The orange dotard has been misrepresenting his health to a comical degree. His doctors annually release implausible physical results, steeped in marveling nonsense.

After his first election, Mr. Trump’s doctor, the late Harold Bornstein, released a statement (later confirmed as dictated by the president) that Mr. Trump was “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Mr. Bornstein later had his practice raided, ransacked (“raped,” as he described it) to ensure no copy of those medical records remained in the world. The “breach” that prompted this? An “unauthorized disclosure” that Mr. Trump was prescribed the hair-growth medication Propecia.

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

Mr. Trump’s next physician, Dr. Ronny “Candyman” Jackson, was clearly on the take too—after he released an over-the-top bill of health praising the president’s “good genes,” “incredible genes,” and suggested that he “might live to be 200 years old,” he was rewarded with nomination as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, though he later had to withdraw after reporting indicated he freely dispensed narcotics to Trump staffers and drank to excess on the job. He was then endorsed for the congressional seat he now occupies as a total sycophant.

Mr. Trump’s dedication to hiding his deficiencies—slurred speech, memory lapses, worsening balance, obesity, paranoia, malignant narcissism, impulsivity, obsessive ruminations—has gone so far that, in 2019, he chose to remain awake while his asshole was operated on. A camera on a tube snaked through his rectum without anesthesia, simply to preserve his appearance of strength.

To be clear, people undergoing cancer treatment often still perform demanding jobs. There are workers on construction sites who toil in hard physical labor four days a week while going to chemotherapy. We forget many Americans do not have the luxury to forgo making money and paying bills “just” because they are dying.

This may be Mr. Biden’s last illness. Even if he beats this, like all of us, he will not beat everything forever. He has fewer days ahead of him than behind. If we could allow our body politic to understand that politicians have bodies that cannot last indefinitely, the incentive to lie will cease being reinforced by scrutiny. A human’s health failing is not a scandal, but for Mr. Biden, it was treated as one. Which created the spiral: he could not show weakness, so he overcompensated. That worsened his condition, which then had to be concealed. Et sic deinceps.

We talk about aides propping people up. Delegation is not problematic, concealment is. If Mr. Biden had said, I am growing old. It is harder to stay up late. I will not run again. Where I cannot fill the gaps, my Vice President will, I believe America would have understood. Instead, we got the worst of all worlds. He got out—but not soon enough to preserve his reputation or save the country from fascism.

It would be easier, I think, for people to make these better choices if it were not for the moral rot and sadism that MAGA feeds and breeds.

Donald Trump Jr.—who, for all his slavish emulation of his father, resembles an adulterine, a child of cuckoldry—will come to regret his reprehensible treatment of Mr. Biden in this hour. For some reason, Jr. spent his Sunday afternoon—after church?—crafting conspiracy theories and recriminations about an elderly man’s ass, instead of shutting up and wishing him well.

“What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer—or is this yet another cover-up???” Jr. asked, insinuating that it is the job of a wife with a doctorate in education to perform routine colonoscopies on her husband. I can understand why Kimberly Guilfoyle and Vanessa Trump kicked him to the curb if that is something he expects in the bedroom.

I do not understand why Jr. has allowed himself to be such a damnable churl; I find him to be abhorrent and repellent, lacking his father’s minimal emotional warmth. Still, this is a surprising admission of moral perversion, even from someone whose sole pleasure is hunting endangered animals.

Jr.’s callousness should neither be forgiven nor forgotten. Illness is not something that can be fairly mocked—nobody is immune or will be untouched. Jr. may have been blessed ’til now to avoid scrapes with serious illness, but unless he does not love at all, it is doubtful he has avoided loving anyone who will experience a death from disease. Whether it be his next girlfriend, his ex-wife, his father, or his daughter, someone in his life will find themselves dying in a hospital. And then, one wonders if he can live without shame for having spoken of Mr. Biden this way.

Can Jr. escape that internal spiritual humiliation forever, and continue to the end of his life with no self-reflection? He cannot. There come private moments where shame revisits you, where in the horror of your experience, you find an echo of something you once mocked with perverse Schadenfreude. Such a moment is dreadful.

I am an unkind person, yet I still choose to treat my enemies with the maximal amount of charity of which I am capable, because I find that those who extend the least kindness will experience an uncomfortable void, a scenario where the people around them grow disdainful and distrustful of their coldness and to avoid them in sensitive times. Unless this man is visited tomorrow by ghosts to set him straight, I fear he is heading toward a lonely hour where nobody will grant him comfort as he has to mourn in his circle what he mocked in another’s.

Jr.’s villainy is not a flaw unique to him; that barren disease has infected the GOP beyond repair. While the president’s son mocks Mr. Biden’s condition, Mr. Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” pimped by House Speaker Mike Johnson, will extend that cruelty to millions of Americans.

This bill does not strengthen the weak, heal the sick, or bind up the injured—it instead cuts nearly $834 billion from Medicaid, imposes 80-hour monthly work requirements on recipients aged 19 to 64, initiates more frequent eligibility checks to remove people “on the cusp” from the program, and reduces federal support for state Medicaid programs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, these measures could lead to 8.6 million people losing their health coverage over the next decade.

GOP lawmakers were aware of these complications before passing it, and their main contention was whether or not the sick would be left to fester soon enough.

There is a time to run for office, a time to serve; a time to step down, and a time to rest—to heal. Only then, I think, is it proper to schedule a time to die (as, I remind you, three Democrats who could have stopped this fiscal suicide did.) Failure to manage those intervals with care is catastrophic to one’s dignity, and in the high-stakes exercise of government, to the dignity and well-being of those who had no say in the decision-making process.

While we are carefully writing about the illnesses of the wealthy and powerful with sensitivity and candor, the country is getting fucked because leaders did not make their choices as thoughtfully. A struggling young man or woman with no employer-sponsored health care, managing a chronic, painful, or fatal condition, did not choose for Mr. Biden to seek re-election and give the keys to the nation’s Treasury to MAGA Republicans in Congress calling a budget that guts Medicaid “big and beautiful.” But it is that person, at the mercy of our politics, who will suffer for it. The same treatments that Mr. Biden will no doubt enjoy and could extend his life by a few years will not be available to someone poorer, who may now die sooner in this world than he would have in one governed by better choices.

In sum: I wish Mr. Biden the best, and I think Mr. Tapper’s ghoulish book tour should end, but I hope Democratic leaders can start to recognize why the electorate frustrated with “gerontocracy” is not mean, agist, and ableist, and importantly, get it through their heads that the public has not and will not be immediately trusting towards Democrats for some time. Over the coming months leading to the 2026 and 2028 primaries and elections, aged lawmakers should start to make plans to pass their institutional wisdom on and enjoy life outside Washington. Benefit of the doubt or forbearance should no longer be assumed, and the consequences of this vanity are not bearable. If it is not already too late for America—anti-authoritarian scholars have been migrating to Canada, which seems alarming—it will be, if we cannot achieve a real majority in the House and then retake the presidency. That will not be possible if we spend the Party’s treasury serving carrion-feeders instead of voters.

postscript

Thanks to everybody who participated in May’s Reader Mailbag. I hope to do another one in mid-June, but I beg of you to please not spam my e-mail with your hot takes on Joe Biden’s age.