Former President Donald Trump would make history as the oldest person ever to be inaugurated to the presidency if he wins next week, a fact Democrats are trying to exploit as they describe him as unfit for office.
Mr. Trump turned 78 in June while President Biden reached age 78 a couple of weeks after Election Day in 2020.
Mr. Biden was chased from the race due to concerns about his age and cognitive abilities. Now, Democrats are trying to flip the script by highlighting Mr. Trump’s senior status and meandering speeches.
“Elect a new generation of leadership, not a nearly 80-year-old man screaming at clouds every day,” Ms. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, told a Wisconsin crowd on Monday.
Should he win and serve a full term, Mr. Trump would be poised to eclipse Mr. Biden’s record as the oldest sitting president in U.S. history — something he is playing down at times.
“I’m not that close to 80,” Mr. Trump said at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
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The Trump campaign says he has demonstrated the stamina to lead the nation.
“President Trump has more energy and a harder work ethic than anyone in politics, and it shows as he runs laps around Kamala Harris on the campaign trail,” Mr. Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said.
Mr. Trump’s busy schedule and marathon speeches make age a difficult target for Democrats, said Ross Baker, a politics professor at Rutgers University.
“There has been a somewhat half-hearted effort by the Democrats to make age an issue, but it probably only the opposition to him among those not apt to support him for other reasons,” he said. “Going too hard on the debility of age could end up insulting older voters.”
Still, concerns about Mr. Trump’s age have grown in past months but remain far below the level Mr. Biden contended with before dropping out of the race, according to a voter panel conducted by YouGov.
Mr. Biden’s unsteady gait, wanderings on stage and halting rhetoric, plus his absent-minded performance in a June debate against Mr. Trump, solidified fears about his age.
According to the YouGov panel, about seven in 10 Americans thought Mr. Biden was too old to be president in July, the month he withdrew and Ms. Harris took over the Democratic ticket.
The share of panelists saying that Mr. Trump is too old to be president rose from 35% to 44% in the February-to-October period, while the share saying he isn’t too old dropped from 53% to 46%.
Ms. Harris, 60, hasn’t made Mr. Trump’s age a central part of her stump speech, but she’s circled the concept by describing Mr. Trump as a person in decline.
“I think he actually is increasingly unstable and unhinged and has resorted to name-calling because he actually has no plan for the American people,” Ms. Harris told CBS News.
Her running mate, Mr. Walz, has been more direct.
Mr. Trump “has been qualified for Social Security for many years, by the way,” Mr. Walz told voters in Madison, Wisconsin. “He’s a nearly 80-year-old man, so he has known that Social Security is there. But you know what, he doesn’t care because he sits down at Mar-a-Lago. Know who does care? All of our parents.”
Mr. Trump was the oldest president upon inauguration, at 70 years old in January 2017, before Mr. Biden came along.
Ronald Reagan is next on the list, at 69 during his inauguration in 1981. Yet the iconic Republican, at 77, was second only to Mr. Biden by the end of his second term.
If he wins and serves a full second term, Mr. Trump would be 82 when he leaves the White House.
Elon Musk, a staunch Trump supporter and the world’s richest man, once said that would be far too old.
“Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America,” Mr. Musk wrote in a post X in 2022 that spoke favorably about GOP primary contender Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ chances against Mr. Biden in a general election.
Mr. Trump injected youth into the GOP ticket by selecting Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his running mate.
Mr. Vance, at 40, is unusually young for a politician in Washington, and he’s 25 years younger than former Vice President Mike Pence, who fell out with Mr. Trump after the Capitol attack by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Pressed on his age, Mr. Trump recently said he would be willing to hire a CEO his age.
“I know many people in their 80s. I know guys in their 80s that won’t leave the company, like family companies where they don’t want the kids to take over because they’re much more competent than their kids,” Mr. Trump told Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago this month.
