President Joe Biden is routinely attacked, mocked, and ridiculed for his supposed physical and cognitive decline, while other comparable political figures like Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell—and even President Ronald Reagan—got much gentler treatment from their opponents and the media into their later years.
The easy explanation is that being one of a hundred senators is nothing like being president of the country. Also, Reagan was president 40 years ago, which is like being in another galaxy. The traditions that insulated them are vanishing in the age of social media but can help provide context for what Biden and former President Donald Trump, too, face today.
The late California Sen. Feinstein had shown serious decline for years before dying in office last year at age 90. Her staff covered for her, which is how such things are customarily done in the Senate. She was an icon for women with an illustrious career, and respect for her and what she’d accomplished kept her in office—even when she was no longer a fully functioning senator. After she gave up her seat on the Judiciary Committee, her uneven cognition didn’t matter as much, and even her critics backed off.
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A similar dynamic is at play with Republican Mitch McConnell, who last year became the longest-serving Senate leader in history. Republicans circled the wagons around him after two very public brain freezes knowing that he will step down as leader after the November election. McConnell cemented his legacy—for good or for ill—with his outreached hand earlier this month to ex-President Trump, whom he had once castigated as bearing responsibility for Jan. 6.
Ronald Reagan giving a speech in the Oval Office of the White House.
Diana Walker/Getty ImagesReagan likely had the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in his second term, but he was always detached from details, so his lack of attention to governing wasn’t a new thing. He was a Hollywood actor, and he played the role of president beautifully. If he was slipping cognitively, it didn’t seem to matter. He was hailed as a “Big Picture” guy.
First elected at age 69 and then the oldest president to hold the office, his schedule was kept light under the orders of first lady Nancy Reagan, who set boundaries like, “I want him home for dinner.” There was always an understanding that Reagan was not going to work that hard. He made a joke out of it, saying, “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?”
When Reagan traveled to Japan for a G7 meeting in 1986, it took him nearly a week to get there—with two nights in Honolulu and three nights in Bali to get the then-75-year-old president acclimated to the time change.
Compare that to Biden’s back-to-back trips to France and Italy last week, interspersed with a day at home to be with his son—newly convicted on gun charges—then capped with a dash across time zones to a campaign fundraiser on the other coast. Trump allies say somebody else is pulling the strings, that Biden isn’t fully present, that he’s the puppet—an attack for which they have provided no evidence.
Biden has been underestimated throughout his career, and his rival says he can’t complete a sentence and is too weak and feeble to stand for 90 minutes, the length of the CNN debate next week. That’s a low bar for an incumbent president seeking re-election, and Democrats are cautiously confident Biden will clear it like he did at the State of the Union address in March.
Unlike other politicians in the swan song of their careers, Biden is the only thing standing in the way of Trump reclaiming the Oval Office and imposing his dark vision of America with an autocratic government.
Biden’s stiff gait and his soft voice make him seem older than he is, and there’s no getting around the fact that he looks older than he did in 2020. Every president visibly ages while in office because of the passage of time and the stress of the job. But there is no credible evidence of cognitive decline in Biden that would suggest anything beyond normal aging.
Lots of people in their eighties can’t drive anymore or ride a bicycle, but their mind is fully functioning. Dementia is a real thing, and it’s more than flubbing a name or a date. Trump’s recent rantings about boats powered by batteries competing with a shark attack and calling the fictional Hannibal Lecter “a nice guy” are drawing more attention to the former president’s mental state.
The Trump camp is ginning up anything they can find to make Biden look befuddled and appear like he’s not in command. Video last week made the rounds allegedly showing Biden wandering aimlessly away from the G7 leaders and having to be led back by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Turns out Biden had moved away from the group watching an aerial show to talk to one of the skydivers who had just landed. That part of the video was not shown in the clip posted by RNC Research.
Joe Biden arrives at Borgo Egnazia Resort during the first day of the G7 meeting on June 13, 2024 in Fasano, Italy.
Alessandra Benedetti/Getty Images“I got really mad at that,” says Jack Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College who was acting director of RNC Research in 1989-91 before he went into academia. “We didn’t do stuff like that,” he told The Daily Beast, recalling that the RNC’s (Republican National Committee) communications director had to quit in 1989 after writing a memo saying then-Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley should “come out of the Liberal closet,” a lame attempt to raise questions about his personal life that President George H. W. Bush at the time called “disgusting.”
Standards have shifted over the years. Attacks on sexual orientation don’t carry the sting they did then. The RNC’s doctored video on Biden got 2.9 million views on X.
Nobody is being shamed into quitting. Two old guys are competing to lead the country. Because of his girth and swagger, Trump gives the illusion of physical vigor. Biden, with his stiffness and controlled movements, seems older, which he is by three and a half years. “If we judge presidents by their gait, we never would have had FDR,” says Pitney.
We shouldn’t be fooled about what matters to govern a country and preserve democracy.
