Fox News host Dana Perino claimed Monday that it is “ridiculous” and “cutesy” for Democrats to call attention to how 78-year-old Donald Trump is the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history.
Perino’s plea comes after months of relentless attacks on Fox regarding President Joe Biden’s age and acuity—concerns that spread to the mainstream following his June debate performance and which ultimately led the 81-year-old to step down in an unprecedented move Sunday afternoon.
On The Five, Perino and some of her co-hosts had a hard time dealing with the fact that Republicans will have to face similar criticisms about the head of their ticket being a septuagenarian.
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“The Democrats have this bat signal that goes out, like ‘here’s the new talking point.’ So after saying that Joe Biden was perfectly fine, and his age didn’t matter at all, and he ran circles around them at the White House, now all of the sudden this memo basically goes out that says, ‘Trump is now the oldest nominee in history,’” Perino said.
“And it’s so incredibly ridiculous, because they actually seem to believe that cutesy ridiculousness like that might work. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Not only is Trump the oldest presidential nominee, but the leading contender for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Kamala Harrris, is 19 years his junior. If Harris emerges from next month’s Democratic National Convention as her party’s nominee, the age gap between each major party’s choice for president would be the largest since 2008.
Since Biden’s endorsement of Harris as his successor, some Democrats quickly made use of the new political ammo.
“Donald Trump is too old to be President,” Rep. Casey Weinstein (D-OH) wrote succinctly on X.
Past statements about age from those who have since cozied up to Trump are also unflattering. Elon Musk, who announced recently that he was endorsing the felonious former president, wrote in a July 2022 post on X that Trump’s age at the end of a second term, 82, “is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”
