1
The Good Father, Turned into an Enfeebled Grampa
Ageism, merging with other disreputable prejudices, drove President Joe Biden out of the 2024 race. However you now think about his renunciation, it was another win for a set of horrifying national biases that, if they remain unopposed, will now afflict Americans as we grow older. In a relatively short time–since the COVID Era began in 2020–ageism has become a force powerful enough to kill 200,000 indigent, segregated, mostly old, mostly female, nursing home residents at the bottom of society, and remove one powerful man from political candidacy at the very top.
What happened to Biden begins my analysis, although he is only one part of this grim social and political history. There is no redoing the brief moment of political crisis in early summer 2024. Nevertheless, many have continued to try to do just that. As I write (May 2025), the former president has announced that he has prostate cancer, and charges have resurfaced that people around him downplayed, or hid, his mental or physical challenges while in office. (In consideration of the current crises—the chaos and damages, nationally and internationally, inflicted by the current chief of state, Robert Reich’s advice under Trump2 is “Stop asking about a Biden ‘cover-up.’”) As part of the history of ageism and on behalf of future age justice, my goal in this essay is to provoke a comprehensive meditation on what prejudice has wrought in the American scene.
In his Oval Office address in July 2024, when President Biden announced he had decided to drop out, he expectedly gave reasons other than his alleged future decline. He thought he would be fine and do well in the election. On August 11, in an interview published in the New York Times, he repeated, about the CNN debate with Donald Trump that had been the pinpoint of trouble, that he’d had “a really, really bad day” on June 27th only because he was coming down with COVID; or, he had dropped out to avoid being “a distraction.” At his convention speech soon after, he invited the entire nation to notice the unfairness of ageism at both ends of his political career. “I either have been too young to be in the Senate because I wasn’t thirty yet, and too old to stay as president.” (That statement was misunderstood, by Fintan O’Toole, as Biden’s willingness to accept unfair judgments that have dogged him all his adult life, as offering “some comfort” for him and as his offering “permission [to Democrats] to revel in their relief.”) As Biden’s chastisement of those who made age count wrongly, it was mild.
The fact of the matter is that hasty, withering, and growing bullying about Biden’s alleged age-related disabilities forced a sitting president out of the all-important 2024 race, when advocates of democracy urgently needed to derail Trump’s promised tyranny. The compound biases connected to later life have become blatant, not covert, motives. They were powerful enough at the time to disrupt what had long seemed an obvious second term for an incumbent president with a sterling progressive record and only rare, atypical signs of physical or cognitive loss.
* * *
What needs our close attention is how the pile-on managed to succeed. It might not have. By the day after the debate, speaking in Raleigh, N.C., Biden had recovered his vocal modulations, optimistic smile, and rhetorical power. As the disparagement began to build, a few resistant Democrats tried to point out (to a press, some donors, and other leaders who were suddenly refusing to notice) that incumbency is too powerful to surrender. “I think in the end, if the president is committed to making this run, every Democrat will be with him,” said Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts. The large Democratic base would unite for the ticket on November 5, having no other place to go. At the Chicago convention in August, Biden was thanked with rapture for his historic successes as president: “We love Joe,” thousands shouted. (Had he stayed in, there would have been more “Uncommitted” protesters outside, because of his stance on Israel’s war on Gazans, but four days of that adulation inside the hall.) Only two weeks before Biden debated, a Politico/ Morning Consult poll found that that only a third of voters thought it likely that Harris could win the election as the Democratic nominee, and just three of five Democrats believed she could. The debate, or more exactly, reactions to the debate, turned that prognosis upside down.
Biden was well-known for stamina: working the phones, prodding legislators to pass his hugely effective programs, congratulating his people on policy successes. His vigorous campaigning seemed, as ever, amazing, especially to people like me who have lived about as long, and who can only envy his ability to multi-task—to compartmentalize worry about his personal political future so that he could accomplish myriad urgent tasks. Even while the incessant bullying was going on, he was vigorously arranging a historic, complex prisoner exchange with Russia, and then, at the NATO summit, persuading reluctant European heads of government, in widely reported one-on-one meetings (not “scripted”), to join US support for Ukraine.
Most staff close to Biden unsurprisingly said that they had not noticed signs of mental impairment. In the immediate, growing panic over his cognitive ability and frailty, however, they were accused of ignoring “facts.” Those who pointed out that the debate performance was an “episode,” due to a cold, or fatigue after stressful travels, were also by and large ignored. “Disastrous” became the single final word, and remains so. Geriatricians and gerontologists explained–to deaf ears–that vocal cords thin with age and that a verbal flub (e.g., using one proper noun for another, or briefly losing one’s place in an argument) is not a sign of dementia. It can be part of normal aging, leaving other faculties intact. The February 2024 Hur Report, consigning him to the category “elderly” people with “faulty,” “hazy” memories, had its impact weakened by Republican Robert Hur’s having told Biden that he seemed to have a “photographic memory.”
In the 2020 election four year earlier, Biden’s demeanor had made him seem the Good Father, as I argued in American Prospect. In 2020, the contrast of archetypes was startling: Biden’s trim figure, open smile, and naturally white hair against the bloated, bleached-blond, hectoring Trump, the macho Bad Dad of so many miserable abused childhoods. Suddenly, in 2024, however, the split-screen TV contrast could make Biden’s slenderness and comparative pallor read as frailty, not health. Without hard evidence, a rumor ran that his gait showed early Parkinson’s. That was an attempt to make his aging, or his alleged denial of his illness, the issue. Aging lets US culture off the hook; ageism demands a harder look at events.
I write about that key debate not as a Biden loyalist, but as a democratic socialist (I had watched approvingly as Biden moved left in his presidency, weakening neoliberal hegemony); and as an activist who was then working the ground-game against Trump. But it is as a decades-long anti-ageist scholar and author, that I admired Biden’s clearly well-rehearsed ability to maintain a small wry smile through Trump’s harangues, and Biden’s impromptu readiness to correct the former president’s flurry of lies almost as fast as that well-rehearsed liar could produce them. For her debate with Trump, Harris learned from Biden to look steadily at her opponent, with her own more varied poses of calm detachment.
“Admiration” however, was not admissible in the media pile-on that followed. One Senator saw Biden as “standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed,” according to the New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz. “[F]rozen behind his podium, mouth agape,” “tongue-tied,” “eyes wide and unblinking.” In the Columbia Journalism Review, as early as July, Lucy Schiller had already compiled the negative views.
I argue that some opinions ought to be dismissed as observational or interpretive errors. Apprehensive viewers were legion; I knew people who couldn’t bear to watch the debate. Such viewers saw only the fumbles they expected to see. And these, rather than Biden’s palpable hits—“You are the child” was a retort to Trump’s empty boast about his golf game–were replayed relentlessly. On debate night, to anyone watching, not already primed for disappointment, Biden could have been seen as tired but quietly accomplished. Many who needed the party to win had, however, been primed for failure–anxious allies, too fearful for him as well as fearful about him. It was a childlike fear, inspired by Trump’s uninhibited belligerence and, as I saw it, the memory of his stalking Hillary Clinton in a 2016 debate. The Good Father of 2020 had become the endangered Grandpa of 2024. Democratic unity crumbled; Republicans crowed.
Signs of truly “disastrous” cognitive confusion did appear throughout that debate, but in the repetitive bluster and frequent incoherence of the other candidate. Trump is only a few years younger than Biden, and had long rambled and lost his train of thought. But in the immediate aftermath of the debate, few media observers judged Trump. MAGA Republicans had played the age card relentlessly: Senator Rick Scott had said Biden was “unfit for office.” Tucker Carlson had made Biden’s age “one of the central themes of his twerpy routine,” Christian Lorentzen noted in a review of books about Biden’s White House years. At that point, journalists and Democrats alike focused on Biden’s age, on Biden’s looks, voice, speech; and speculated on his prospective or hidden illness, cognitive loss. The older we are in appearance, the likelier we are to be the targets of ageism, ableism, and dementism.
Many who could have appreciated Biden’s debate performance, as I managed to do despite those frightening, untoward circumstances, had also been infected by the campaign against “gerontocracy” that the press had organized for at least two years, with the language of “Youthful” energy and “passing the torch” that we now have to endure any time the charge of “too old” surges again. The October 2023 New Yorker cover showing four major politicians on walkers (“in the race”) had undergirded ageism with ableism to make holding on to power, or wanting to, in itself look feeble.
Judging whether someone in so central a political space, at so critical a time in US history, was “too old” ought not to have been a rapid, superficial decision, in a country so rife with unacknowledged (or even flaunted) prejudice against older adults. Since Biden had had a remarkably effective first term, those deciding he needed to exclude himself were hastily extrapolating an unprovable prophecy, mainly on the evidence of the single debate–that his old age in a second term would mirror that of the cognitively impaired Ronald Reagan, rather than that of the prodigious and noble activist, Jimmy Carter.
How ludicrous will it look to posterity that Trump was given an A for his debate performance when Biden’s was judged, soon and thereafter, to be “disastrous”? It was disastrous only for Biden, as ageist ableism even affected the polling that was used to justify pressuring him to drop out.
2
When Ageism means death
The larger historical point is this: In the COVID Era, American ageism, ableism, and dementism (the bias against those who appear to have declined mentally through diseases that include Alzheimer’s) have become not only a matter of overt election-period unreason but also a terrifyingly wide-spread social phenomenon. Even those like me who had recognized their lethal power in the nursing-home COVID catastrophe watched almost in disbelief as this new force was used to defeat the will and intentions of “the leader of the free world,” a US president.
The nursing home deaths from COVID—152,000 or more in the first year, 200,000 eventually—were, in some damnable way, expectable results of discrimination, since the residents were weak, powerless, indigent, and mostly old and female as well. Most residents still are. People on Medicaid have to spend down their assets, if they have any, to get long-term care from the government. They are wrongly stereotyped as miserable. Although residents arrive hoping to enjoy life with statutorily-required care, society tends to consider them “patients,” close to death. Call this lethal intersection compound ageism.
When COVID hit, all but 1,950 of the 15,477 nursing facilities failed to close their doors to the coronavirus. As my research for American Eldercide, my latest book, shows in detail, the deaths of residents and rehab patients were premature and preventable. The responsible parties–from then-president Trump’s administration and the state departments of health, down to the owners and operators of most facilities–largely abandoned the 1.4 million people under their care. They left them without enough Personal Protective Equipment, testing, or surveillance. They stopped monitoring the facilities for abuse and neglect. They could fail in many ways because in the national panic, few public officials with podiums called out the system that had put the residents in the merciless hands of the for-profit nursing-facility industry. Ageism, disability bias, dementism, classism, racism, and sexism created the system, well-meaning on its face, and had kept it largely impervious to reform.
Governors–Baker in Massachusetts and Cuomo in New York–ordered hospitals to release people with COVID to ill-equipped nursing homes, thus infecting their residents. A Lt. Governor in Texas argued that old people in general should sacrifice themselves to keep the economy open. Hospitals and states embraced guidelines, written by people who called themselves bioethicists, that refused access to ICU ventilators to people over certain ages—as young as 45 and 65. Misperceptions had long abounded that all old folks get dementia and that old and/or disabled people become a “burden,” first to spouses and then to their adult children. Care for “the Old” with COVID would be futile. The Juggernaut rolled. “They were gonna die anyway.”
Eighty-five—the age Biden would have passed in office if he had run and won again–became a suspect age because the media reported mortality data as if chronological age—rather than prior medical condition, or level of precaution against the virus—was the cause of so many premature and unnecessary deaths. My dear aunt, now 104, living in the community with her son and aides, never got COVID, then or since. She was protected. So was I. Wherever they lived unprotected, residents of nursing facilities lay exposed like soldiers in trench warfare, waiting helplessly for a contagious bomb. Many survived. Others died horribly, of air hunger, separated by lockdown from loved ones.
Only a horde of expert anti-ageists in medicine, law, and nursing saw the compound ageism manifested clearly within the lethal public-health disaster. As a cultural critic of age, applauding the successes of the other civil rights movements, I have watched with grief as ageism and its associated prejudices metastasized into the most acceptable and even applauded of discriminations. In election season politics in 2024, the virus of ageism had its sport with an entire nation.
3
Ageism in the COVID Era can now be used to blind the public whenever age and cognitive ability are in play. Political historians will be scrutinizing the events of the summer of 2024 to discover exactly how the juggernaut was managed. We cannot know precisely which pressures convinced Biden to drop his candidacy, unless he eventually tells us in an unusually frank memoir. Yet analysis can begin even now.
Timing was obviously critical. The debate occurred on June 27,, 2024. Biden’s renunciation occurred on July 21, 2024, barely three weeks later. Had the Russian prisoner exchange of August 1, 2024 come together just a bit sooner, or had Biden hung tough longer, the Democratic Party might have pulled itself out of its age panic and come together. They knew, as he did, that in their primary, which was the most recent democratic referendum, Biden drew $14,465,519 voters to his side. He had a huge war chest. There were months to go before November 5th, election day, during which party unity and fear of the alternative might have brought to Biden some of the voters that Harris lost: disaffected Black and Latinx men, pro-choice Republican women, wavering union members, and even “Uncommitted” activists trading votes. Parties coalesce for elections. With hundreds of thousands of notable exceptions, the Republican party was already doing so in June, smugly or hypocritically, behind its vehement, incoherent leader.
Until Biden dropped his bid, I believed that the enormous down-ballot campaigns in which I was involved with so many others might succeed in keeping the Senate and recovering the House. Weeks before the debate, a distinguished Harvard political scientist told me there was one chance in twenty that Biden would drop his run just before the Democratic convention, in August. If Biden had waited until August to make his decision, either the polls would have shown him recovering his divided voters, or a brokered convention might have given Harris a more democratic annunciation, and given Biden a better justified moment to exit. Compound ageism would not then have been the decisive factor.
The haughty kingmakers in the media, the liberal commentariat, starting with the New York Times, plus a few big donors, were openly telling Biden to get out. Nancy Pelosi sided with them. A pushy interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, treated the president impertinently, as if he were resisting a welcome outcome. Calm and quizzical with his real opponent, Biden looked uncomfortable, like any old person who notices a sudden lack of respect but can find no dignified way to object.
Some ousters avoided obvious ageism by pointing to a few polls prophesying that Biden could not win. Taken so long before an election, social scientists usually warn, polls are rarely useful. In the heat of a moment, they are unreliable–blurry snapshots of tiny groups with wide margins of error. The fecklessness of Biden’s former supporters in those crucial weeks of indecision was mean. It was divisive. Paul Kleyman, the head of a 1000-person media group called Generations Beat Online, told me the Democrats were making a spectacle of shooting themselves in the foot, “toe by toe.”
Harris lost, by not much. Struggling to find reasons, people who know US history liken her, I think correctly, to Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, who lost to Richard Nixon in 1968 during an unpopular war that Humphrey did not repudiate. Harris could not, in any case did not, promise to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire, despite his genocide in Gaza. Nevertheless, demoralized Democrats blamed Biden for the electoral loss–for not yielding sooner than July 2024. They were already accusing him of denying his “aging.” A former Dean of the UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism, Edward Wasserman, listed as an “ethicist and professor,” got ahead of this pack in a September San Francisco Chronicle op-ed headlined, “The media failed to cover Biden’s decline.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, running for another (six-year) term in Vermont–he is a bit older than Biden—was not being age-baited. He responded effectively to queries about his future “aging,” where that word, as usual, is a synonym for physical and mental decline. And why not brush off the issue? In other countries I know, if you say to anyone, however young, “See you tomorrow,” they respond, “God willing.” Here in the US, however, many people can count on a long health-span, deep into their eighties and nineties. I, exactly Sanders’ age, with many duties at hand, assume I will have at least six years of good productive life ahead of me. If Biden was being honest about feeling fine, he would have had a similar rational expectation. Some pundits and politicians in his own party foolishly argued that Biden was “denying his age,” as if turning eighty were a prophecy of disaster to anyone reaching that age. The pressures may have cruelly caused Biden to internalize that terrible prognostication of inevitable decline–doing far more damage to his self-image than the assassin’s bullet did to Trump’s ear.
One thing Biden did not have was a familiar common language in which to confront ageism publicly, the ability to teach us its universal cost. Ageism is a bitter humiliation for any of us but for him must have constituted a vast party betrayal. In the panicky weeks before Biden anointed his Vice President and before the party and donors consolidated around Harris, it was jaw-dropping that US democracy seemed likely to fall to fascism due to incessant promotions of ageism.
4
A Bad Dad in a Very Public and Serious Decline
Ageism soon began going viral against Trump. As soon as Kamala Harris, age 59, became Trump’s new rival, he instantly became “the old candidate.” Immediately the new president began wielding power in repressive ways that threatened a coup and that undermined people in his own party in Congress, the opposition challenged him through law. His approval ratings dropped in polls. If he had faltered, if he had become “the loser” he has always disdained, even MAGA Republicans would have had recourse to use demeaning language against him. That language would avoid having to admit that the policies that they endorsed have failed.
Two factors that are age-related are currently significant. Domestically, Trump is seen as having given Elon Musk, age 53, and his minions too much power; internationally, he is seen as losing face against Vladimir Putin, in the kind of “deal” Trump has always boasted about winning. The oddly-boyish billionaire Musk, thought to be competent, is meant to hide Trump’s notorious weakness as a CEO; he has proved to be discardable as his promised actions to save trillions by eliminating government programs fail to do so. Cartoons from the US and abroad, often the visual correlative of polls, as soon as February 2025 showed Trump in these two relations as weak, tiny, and dominated; obese, sometimes obese and naked, sometimes led around by the neck or a long red tie. Although age stopped being an issue right after he won the election, weakness and smallness are stereotyped concomitants of being old. It takes increasing grandiosity for him to project power. “Long Live the King,” he posted, brazenly; and on X, an image of himself wearing a crown on a fake Time magazine cover. A few Republican governors and representatives already detect enough weakness to back away, a stance which diminishes his main threat, to “primary” them to prevent their re-election.
Ageist and dementist tactics and language became noticeable in the run-up to the election. The Never-Trump forces had found a weapon against the bullying leader they had repudiated. A Lincoln Project video taunted Trump about being “old” (with selected images that showed him ugly, slow, walking unsteadily, balding under his cotton-candy hair, bereft of family, alone, looking frightened) in a ferocious video called “When the predator becomes the prey.” https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1217098372753232
The video is a startlingly vivid revenge fantasy. The men who say they admire Trump because he is “powerful” thought they wanted an energetic, even violent, Father-figure at the head of the nation, the personality who hangs out with dictators, who fires weak sisters, who is believed to be a successful businessman. The kind of father who disciplines his sons by beating them. Many such men were beaten by their own fathers. The Lincoln Project hoped that such men could be motivated by deep resentment going back to their puny, vulnerable childhood. If social supports dwindle, the stock market craters, and inflation rises, even MAGA sons may turn against the unconsciously resented Bad Dad.
After the debate between Harris and Trump on September 10, 2024, which she “won” without question, a still image appeared of Harris looking toward Trump, with a genuinely sad, pitying look on her face. The poster read
THE FACE YOU MAKE WHEN YOU REALIZE
I’TS TIME TO TAKE AWAY GRANDPA’S CAR KEYS.
“Taking away grandpa’s car keys” is an ageist threat in normal circumstances, say when it’s my car in question, and not the ship of state. In October 2024, the New York Times, while accurately describing Trump’s increasingly deranged speech in an article and a video, headlined the article, “Trump’s Rambling Speeches Reinforce Question of Age.” Age ought to have been irrelevant; Trump could have been fifty and still be an incoherent fantasist, ignorant of matters any former president should know, scowling, making false and preposterous allegations about immigrants’ eating pets and Harris’ “Marxism.” He seemed genuinely impaired, psychologically for sure, perhaps cognitively. Scrutinizing him closely, as he ran for the office of Commander in Chief as a convicted felon who had threatened dictatorship “for a day,” would certainly have been warranted.
Opposition tactics came too late to damage Trump’s candidacy. In September 2024 veteran journalist Mike Barnicle accused the media of refusing to properly represent the harms that could be done by a “damaged, delusional old man.” (He charged also that the media, failing to report the full story of Trump’s weaknesses, was hampered by the unfortunate conventional “spirit of liberal balance.” Other explainers referred to the Weimar government’s capitulation to Hitler.) The one debate Trump agreed to showed that Harris could fight fairly on the issues using her own strengths and campaign enthusiasm, without playing the age card. The truth is, at a crucial period of the race, the media that had harped on Biden’s debate weakness did not pivot fast enough or strongly enough to uncover Trump’s much more visible incompetence and dire and consistent menace.
* * *
At bottom, ageism, ableism, dementism are filled with satisfying feelings (from indifference to condescension, aversion, disdain, hate, vengefulness). These feelings satisfy a sense of comparative power, the bully instinct to look down and punch down. The normative barrier against ageism used to be seniority: the structural practice at work that led to midlife raises in income and the respect that graced people in old age with some authority and dignity. Over the past 50 years, with unionization weakening, with tenure under attack, with generational enmities over-emphasized, the structure sags and respect recedes. When compound ageism works, it often does so subconsciously.
The habit of deploying the armament “too old” politically may arise henceforth even when it seems weak or absurdly out of place. A Boston Globe article used generationalism—the journalist’s imagined prospect of younger voters turning against chronological age itself as a signal of debility–in April 2024 against MA Senator Ed Markey, 78, although he is still running unopposed in the 2026 midterm.
Working openly, compound ageism can now be seen to have changed the course of US political history, demeaning a competent sitting president who could not find enough allies in gerontology and his party to fight it. Working covertly, the forces of compound ageism considered the residents of nursing facilities “too old” and too feeble to even want to live. By inflicting social obliteration, those forces produced an eldercide. Two different ways, two devastating results: overtly and loudly once, at the very top of our society, and covertly, two hundred thousand times, at the very bottom.
Unfortunately, gleefully admiring or automatically firing this social weapon, “too old,” strengthens the intertwined prejudices that we usually unite in lamenting. We may never experience another such concatenation of circumstances in an election season. But when prejudice flies out of the monstrous cave of American unreason, it releases no single blast, but continual fusillades.
Ageism and ableism and dementism, sexism and classism, are already in play in this second Trump administration, with potentially brutal effects. Public health and eldercare are most at risk, from President Trump and his choice for the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Mehmet Oz, an entertainer with an M.D., much of whose health advice is corrupted by self-dealing. Ageism shores up Republican ideological hatred of the safety nets that so many Americans need. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, reform of the nursing-facility system, Meals on Wheels, aging-in-place programs—the well-being of everyone who wants to grow old but does not care to be considered “too old,” is threatened.
We can’t hope to look back from a fairer world on this appalling COVID Era until the nation confronts compound ageism head on, overtly critiquing stereotypes and carefully rejecting discrimination. Social devastation is likely to bear down on our future unless thinkers and activists rally strongly, as they have not yet done, against the bombardment.
The UN’s International Day of Old Persons is October 1. Ageism Awareness Day is October 9. Active Aging Week is in October, and October is World Mental Health month. “American Eldercide” appeared October 2024.
Thanks to the editors of Age, Culture, Humanities Volume 8 for publishing my blog, What “Too Old” Really Means in the COVID Era” in the Forum: “Too Old for the Job?”
References:
only “a really, really bad day” Peter Baker, “Biden says he feared being ‘distraction,’ New York Times, reprinted in the Boston Globe, August 12, 2024.
a Politico/Morning Consult poll Christopher Cadelago, “New poll goes deep on Kamala Harris’ liabilities and strengths as a potential president,” Politico, 06/12/2024. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/12/kamala-harris-favorability-poll-00162093
Gerontologists and geriatricians from around the world analyzed the ageism in US politics. An issue of AgeCultureHumanities published before the debate gives an array: https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/issue/view/10962
My own part in that Forum: https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/144508
Hur Report See David Moye, “Robert Hur Admits Telling Biden He Seemed To Have ‘Photographic Recall,” Huffpost, March 12, 2024. Huffpost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-hur-biden-photographic-recall-eric-swalwell_n_65f0920ae4b01707c6d1f807
Good Father Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Did America Elect a Benign Father Figure?” American Prospect, December 22, 2020. HTTPS://PROSPECT.ORG/POLITICS/DID-AMERICA-ELECT-A-BENIGN-FATHER-FIGURE/
Andrew Marantz words what Senator Peter Welch saw, as Biden “standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed.” New Yorker, September 2, 2024, p. 26.
Christian Lorentzen, “Hey man, we’re out of runway,” London Review of Books, July 18, 2024, pp. 11, 12.
Rep. Stephen Lynch Jim Puzzanghera, Lissandra Villa de Petrzelka and Jackie Kucinich, “‘I think we’re losing the plot here,’ says Ayanna Pressley as Democrats remain divided on Biden,” Boston Globe, July 9, 2024 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/09/nation/steamy-washington-democratic-rebellion-fails-reach-boiling-point/?p1=Article_Inline_Related_Box
14,465,519 primary votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2024_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
Lucy Schiller, “Unpleasant Stuff: Joe Biden and the Semiotics of Old Age,” Columbia Journalism Review, July 18, 2024. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/unpleasant-stuff-schiller-old-age-semiotics-biden.php
Fintan O’Toole, “some comfort” for him “Dynamism & Discipline,” New York Review of Books, October 3, 2024, p. 10.
all but 1,950 of the 15,477 facilities failed Barnett, Michael L., R. J. Waken, Jie Zheng, Jon Orav, Arnold M. Epstein, David C. Grabowski, and Karen E. Joynt Maddox. “Original Investigation: “Changes in Health and Quality of Life in US Skilled Nursing Facilities by COVID-19 Exposure Status in 2020.” JAMA 328 no. 10 (August 19, 2022): 941-950. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.15071
Barnicle on Morning Joe: Greg Sargent, “Finally: Top Journo Erupts at Media for Ignoring Trump’s Mental State,” New Republic, September 5, 2024 https://newrepublic.com/article/185622/finally-top-journo-erupts-media-ignoring-trumps-mental-state?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_weekly
The San Francisco Chronicle op-ed was sent to me by Paul Kleyman,” Dems to Attack Biden on Age if Harris Loses,” private communication, email to author, September 25, 2024.
NY Times article about “Age” Peter Baker and Dylan Friedman, “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age,” NY Times, October 6, 2024.
Video about Trump’s Age Peter Baker, “How Trump’s Speeches Raise Questions about His Age,” NY Times video, October 7, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009739814/how-trumps-speeches-raise-questions-about-age.html
Boston Globe article against Sen. Ed Markey for his age. Anjali Huynh, “Senator Ed Markey won his 2020 reelection thanks to the Markeyverse. Can he convince young people to support him again?” Boston Globe, April 18, 2025. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/18/metro/ed-markey-young-voters-2026-midterms-trump/
