The complicated reality of America’s oldest president was encapsulated when Biden tripped over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy commencement, plunging to the ground. Inside the complicated reality of being America's oldest president:
American educator and First Lady of the United StatesWASHINGTON — There was the time last winter when President Joe Biden was awakened at 3 a.m. while on a trip to Asia and told that a missile had struck Poland, touching off a panic that Russia might have expanded the war in Ukraine to a NATO ally. Within hours in the middle of the night, Biden consulted his top advisers, called the president of Poland and the NATO secretary-general, and gathered fellow world leaders to deal with the crisis.
It is one of a man who has slowed with age in ways that are more pronounced than just the graying hair common to most recent presidents during their time in office. Biden sometimes mangles his words and looks older than he used to because of his stiff gait and thinning voice. Still, few people fail to notice the changes in one of the nation’s most public people. As vice president a dozen years ago, Biden engaged in energetic squirt-gun battles each summer with the children of aides and reporters. More than a decade later, he shuffled stiffly across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to mark the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
A study of Biden’s schedule based on data compiled by Axios and expanded by the Times found that Biden has a similar morning cadence as the president he served, Barack Obama. Neither had many public events before 10 a.m., just 4% in Obama’s last year in office and 5% in Biden’s first 2 1/2 years. But the real difference came in the evening. Obama was twice as likely to do public events after 6 p.m. compared with Biden, 17% to 9%.
Like many his age, Biden repeats phrases and retells the same hoary, often fact-challenged stories again and again. He can be quirky; when children visit, he may randomly pull a book of William Butler Yeats off his desk and start reading Irish poetry to them. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, noted that Republican hard-liners were grousing that Biden had gotten the better of McCarthy in the fiscal deal. “It’s telling that the same extreme MAGA members of Congress who’ve been talking about his age complained this week that he outsmarted them on the budget agreement,” Bates said.
Most striking was Trump’s cognitive performance. He was erratic and tended to ramble; experts found that he had grown less articulate and that his vocabulary had shrunk since his younger days. Aides said privately that Trump had trouble processing information and distinguishing fact from fiction.
Following afternoon events, Biden returns to the residence around 6:45 p.m. For dinner, pasta is a favorite. In fact, one former official said, whenever he travels, aides make sure there is always red sauce on hand for pasta to finish his day — even as he balks at the salmon that his wife urges on him.
Still, after fatiguing days on the road, he skipped dinner with world leaders in Indonesia last year and again in Japan in May. Others who have known him for years said privately that they have noticed small changes. When he sits down, one former official said, he usually places a hand on his desk to hold his weight and rarely springs back up with his old energy.
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