Too old to be president?

Joe Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory [suffering from] diminished faculties in advancing age.”

Thus spoke special counsel Robert Hur, explaining why President Biden has to be cleared of mishandling classified documents. It doesn’t take a logician of Aristotelian attainment to see that a man deemed mentally incompetent to stand prosecution isn’t competent enough to sit in the White House.

The finding created a maelstrom of rhetoric, making up in breadth for what it lacks in depth. Mooted proposals ranged from invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (dismissing a president medically unfit to govern) to amending the Constitution.

If we have the lower age limit of 35 for any prospective president, the argument goes, it stands to reason that a higher limit should also be introduced. The most popular cut-off point is 75, although one gets the feeling that, if Trump were 57 rather than 77, most American pundits would favour nominating 56 as an age beyond which senility beckons.

A few remarks are in order. First, the existing threshold is too low: the 18^th century’s 35 is today’s 50.

That limit was set when the average life expectancy wasn’t much higher than 35. A man that age (the possibility of a female president was discounted at the time) was thus in an advanced middle age and at the peak of his powers.

These days, he is widely regarded (in my family of two) as a barely post-pubescent youngster. Looking at this more objectively, it’s easy to argue that no one under 35 has enough experience of life to lead a nation. Such a man can be trusted to head a major bank where he’d only be risking other people’s money, but not a major country where he’d be risking other people’s lives.

Such a blanket premise seems straightforward to me. However, any specific upper limit is too open to dispute. One could make a persuasive argument that each case ought to be judged individually.

Show me a septuagenarian who claims his cognitive abilities haven’t declined, and I’ll show you a liar. The decline can be expressed as a proportion, say 10, 20 or 30 per cent. But a proportion of what?

Speaking from personal experience, my memory is nowhere near what it was 50 years ago, when I could memorise long poems after a single reading. But it’s still pretty decent, with most lapses occurring when I’m stuck for a word being interviewed in Russian.

Having an excellent memory is an accident of birth; its decline is a consequence of age. Fair enough. But what matters is the absolute cognitive level, not a relative one. If a chap has a capital of £500,000 and loses 50 per cent of it, he is still richer than someone who merely loses 10 per cent of his £50,000.

Getting back to Biden, of course he isn’t qualified to be president. And of course it’s instantly obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he isn’t compos mentis. But that’s not because he is 81, but because his proportional decline started from an abysmally low point.

Has he ever been fit to be president even when his cognitive faculties were in working order? Which career highlights prove Biden’s superlative statesmanship? Or indeed his towering intellect and razor sharpness? If there ever has been a walking argument against one-man-one-vote democracy, Biden is it.

There have been dangerously senile presidents before him. Woodrow Wilson’s wife ran the country in his second term. During Eisenhower’s second term, Nixon was more influential than vice presidents traditionally are. During Reagan’s second term, the country was effectively run by James Baker.

Yet ‘second term’ are the key words. Yes, there have been senile presidents before Biden. But he holds the distinction of having started out that way when first elected. His cognitive ability should have been tested when he first declared his candidature, which would have removed him from the ballot there and then.

That, to me, points to the solution. If insufficient experience before age 35 is universal, cognitive ability at any age is individual. Hence all presidential candidates regardless of age should undergo appropriate tests, including those measuring their IQ. Then it would be possible to talk in reliable absolute values, not meaningless relative ones.

Biden’s defenders, which in reality means Trump haters, point out that their bogeyman isn’t exactly a spring chicken either. And he too has had memory lapses in public.

Of course he has. A 77-year-old with the memory of a youngster would be superhuman and, whatever Trump’s fans aver, he isn’t. But he started from a much higher intellectual and cognitive plateau than Joe Biden. Hence a similar proportional decline has produced a less detrimental effect, and I for one am convinced that Trump is cognitively qualified to be president.

His other qualifications are something else again. Yesterday, for example, Trump made a staggeringly irresponsible statement that, if a NATO country didn’t spend enough on defence, he’d encourage Putin to attack it.

Putin has shown on several occasions that he doesn’t need any encouragement from US presidents. However, I’m sure he’d welcome this call to action. Saying what Trump said is especially inexcusable because it can’t be put down to any cognitive decline.

If he wanted to make the perfectly valid point that other NATO countries should spend more, much more, on defence, he should have just said it. In fact, those countries are beginning to get the message on their own, if too slowly.

However, it may come as a surprise to Trump, but some issues are more complex than just dollars and cents. It’s not just how much but also how effectively money is spent on defence. Britain, for example, is the world’s sixth biggest defence spender, and yet much of the funds are squandered by incompetence and corruption (for details, I recommend this article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13066863/Andrew-Neil-Britain-biggest-defence-spender-Armed-Forces-badly-equipped-incompetence.html)

The issue of NATO defence must be discussed seriously and urgently. However, doing so in Trump’s loose-cannon terms makes one wonder how much safer America would be in his hands.

Whenever anyone offers the slightest criticism of Trump’s logorrhoea, his admirers have a ready-made mantra: it’s not words but deeds that matter. It’s almost unsporting to offer the blindingly obvious retort to that: words become deeds when uttered by top politicians. Much blood has been spilled throughout history because of injudicious phrasing.

One example off the top: when meeting Alexander I at Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon unwisely alluded to the role the tsar had played in the assassination of his father. No lasting peace was possible after that. Alexander formed or joined one anti-Napoleon coalition after another, which eventually led to the carnage of 1812.

On balance, I’m glad I no longer vote in US elections, although if I did, I’d close my eyes, pinch my nostrils and go for Trump – hoping that, if he can encourage Putin to attack a Nato country, he’ll also be able to discourage him from doing so.

P.S. Speaking of imbecilic pronouncements on Putin, Peter Hitchens has outdone himself in his pro-appeasement article today. In the middle of it, à propos of nothing, he informed his geographically curious readers that Moscow is “magnificent amid snow”. The only conceivable logical connection I could think of was that we should stop arming the Ukraine because Moscow is pretty in white.