Peter Black

Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com

Feb. 7, 2024

I’ve been thinking about aging. Not that I or anyone else has a choice in the matter. Ha, ha.

Kidding aside, kids, we are referring to aging as it concerns the two likely aspirants to lead the free world. 

The age of presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump, who turns 78 in June, and President Joe Biden, who turned 81 two months ago, is very much an issue as the U.S. election campaign wobbles, dawdles and stumbles towards the November vote.

It is sobering to think that Ronald Reagan, typically depicted as an absent-minded, chuckling old grandpa figure, was actually a sprightly 69 when he won the 1984 election. 

Eight years later, when he left the White House, he was still younger than Trump and Biden are now – and there were those who publicly diagnosed the Gipper with early-onset dementia in the latter years of his presidency. Indeed, Reagan died in 2004 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Here in the frozen north, we have been blessed (debate among yourselves) with an abundance of choir-boyish youthful leaders over the years. Of the 23 PMs since Confederation, nine have been in their 40s or younger when elected, and six in their 50s. The youngest was Joe Clark, who was 39 when he bested Pierre Trudeau in the 1979 election and served as PM for all of 273 days.

Canada’s oldest prime minister when elected was Dr. Charles Tupper, a father of Confederation from Nova Scotia, whose 68-day tenure in 1896 was the shortest in history. The “Ram of Cumberland” was 74 when he had his brief twirl in office, but lived to the ripe old age of 94, quite an achievement in those days.

Sir John A. Macdonald, the longest-serving PM, was 52 when he became Canada’s first head of government with Confederation in 1867. He was 76 when he died in office 24 years later – still younger than Biden and Trump are now.

Even “Uncle” Louis St. Laurent, who just looked like a very old man, was only 66 when he became Canada’s second francophone prime minister in 1948, serving nine years.

In Quebec, surprisingly, no premier has served into their 70s, with the youngest being Robert Bourassa, elected  in 1970 at age 37.

South of the border, though, it’s shaping up to be a battle of the geriatrics. If you’ve been following the American election, you might have noticed a shift in the discourse in recent weeks. Whereas Biden’s mental acuity has been called into question since his first presidential run in 2020, it is now Trump’s mental health that is becoming a topic of concern.

Whereas Trump was once considered to be crazy as a fox, he is now showing signs, according to various reports, of being clinically crazy, if you will.

For example, in a U.S. News report, former psychology professor John Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn, “a movement by medical professionals to draw attention to Trump’s cognitive health,” said Trump is exhibiting symptoms of “advanced dementia.”

Those symptoms include, most publicly and disturbingly, confusing his Republican nomination rival Nikki Haley with former Democratic House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi as the person responsible for security during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection he orchestrated and provoked.

Haley, grasping at a straw in a quixotic campaign, has challenged Trump to a cognitive test showdown. Trump said he has already “aced” a cognitive test, referring to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which measures various mental skills such as “attention and concentration, executive functions, memory, language and conceptual thinking.”

The Biden campaign, in an epic example of turnabout being fair play, last week launched a TV ad mocking Trump’s mental lapses, interspersing clips of his brain cramps – “We won all 50 states, right?” – with comments from his fellow Republicans, including Haley, questioning if he’s losing his marbles. 

One shudders at the prospect of the two candidates, total age 159 years, battling each other over the next 10 months to lead the United States into an uncertain future. 

At least here in Quebec and the rest of Canada, while people may question the policies and character of our political leaders, they don’t question their actual sanity.
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