“Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” wrote the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” If Donald Trump has ever read that poem — an unlikely prospect, I think we can all agree — he certainly isn’t living it. The former president has become a shadow of himself in the home stretch, with the evidence of his flagging energy and memory growing by the week.
At 78, Trump would be the oldest person ever elected to the presidency, so it’s understandable that the issue of his age has been lurking at the edges of his campaign since he announced his third run for the White House nearly two years ago. It crept further into view when 81-year-old Joe Biden was succeeded as the presumptive Democratic nominee by 59-year-old Kamala Harris. On Saturday, Harris’ campaign released her medical records, “seeking to put the focus on Trump,” according to NBC News.
It’s not just you: He didn’t sound like this in 2016.
Trump’s age should be central to the closing stages of this race, not because Harris wants it to be, but because there should be no debate anymore over whether Trump’s age would affect his presidency. In truth, it has already dramatically altered his campaign — and his staff is desperate to pretend otherwise.
Not that anyone would blame his staff for trying to shelter Trump. Here is a verbatim excerpt from his speech Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club:
Democrats don’t want voter ID. You know why? Because they wanna cheat. They don’t wanna — I say, ‘Ohhh, they don’t wanna.’ When I first — I thought I was seeing things, I thought I was ... like, I didn’t hear that when I first start this who — they’d say, ‘The Democrats will not approve voter ID.’
It’s not just you: He didn’t sound like this in 2016. And at this critical phase of the presidential race, the effects of Trump’s age are visible in every major decision taken by his campaign.
Most obviously, the half-hearted gestures toward transparency about his health seen in past campaigns have vanished, as have his boasts of acing “cognitive tests.” Though Trump told CBS in August he’d be happy to release his medical records, the only recent public information is a one-page letter that emerged after the assassination attempt in July. That letter, by his disgraced former personal physician, Rep. Ronny Jackson, describes the bullet wound he received but has no other details about his medical condition.
We don’t need Trump or his doctors to tell us the truth about his cognitive abilities. His campaign’s strategic decisions tell us everything: He has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s incapable of executing any plan or maintaining any discipline. In a normal campaign, for example, a candidate who had lost the previous presidential debate would leap at the chance for a rematch closer to the election. But Trump has refused to do so, even when Fox News offered to host. As Puck reported shortly after the September debate, “within the campaign, there seems to be wide agreement that with the race this tight, Trump can’t afford to lose another news cycle … and therefore, they should prevent him from doing another debate.”
It’s one thing for staffers to fear the candidate would lose a second debate. It’s unprecedented for them to assume he’ll lose. But that’s what they think of his mental state.
Then there are Trump’s travel plans. In a typical campaign, the candidate would be crisscrossing swing states from now to Election Day. But Trump — who is on pace to hold fewer than a third of the rallies he held in 2016 — is visiting states he has no chance of winning, such as Illinois and California. According to CNN, a source “close to Trump” said that “Trump has increasingly been fixated on this idea that his supporters in states not viewed as crucial to the 2024 election deserve to have an opportunity to see him.” Whatever Trump’s reason, his team hasn’t succeeded in persuading him to adopt a more electoral-friendly approach.
At his age, there’s no point in trying to rein his brain in.
It’s also hard to believe that Trump’s increasingly violent, racist rhetoric lines up with the message from his campaign strategists. Immigration has been central to Trump’s pitch to voters since he first ran for president. But it’s never been this central, even as Trump loses ground on voters’ top issue, the economy. His bigotry — saying Latino immigrants disproportionately have “bad genes” — is more blatant than ever. And his enthusiasm for authoritarian solutions — invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which was the legal basis for Japanese Americans’ incarceration during World War II — is less guarded than ever.
Some of Trump’s advisers, according to Rolling Stone, oppose this turn. They’d prefer he’d “play it safe.” But they’re powerless: His calls for mass violence are uninhibited because he is uninhibited. And at his age, there’s no point in trying to rein his brain in.
Of course, Trump’s supporters don’t care that his own campaign does not trust him to be a functional, competent executive. At this late stage, it’s quite possible that Trump could emerge victorious in spite of himself.
But his age matters, both for the few truly undecideds left and for what the electorate should expect from a potential Trump presidency. As chief executive, Trump worked less than any other president. Should he return to the White House, it’s reasonable to assume his age would limit him still further. That in turn leaves more power for the unelected hangers-on around him. Trump’s first term brought multiple attempted or real subversions of democracy; his age guarantees a second term will bring even more.
And from there, no one will be going gently anywhere.