"And a man came up to me ... ... tears streaming down his face, and said, 'Sir, I can't believe what they're trying to do to the country's favourite and most innocent president'."
And Jack Smith replied, "Stop groveling and whining, Donald."
His daddy is gone, Roy Cohn is gone, Michael Cohen is gone, Weiselberg in prison, Jared and Ivanka gone, Meadows testified, his lawyers testified. All he has left is his unwashed Magat horde.
A Narcissist who loses his fluffers is not a pretty sight.
conix, Yet again your mean-spiritedness and your ignorance about old age is showing. And your hypocrisy. Three attributes of yours we know well. You didn't demean Reagan because of his age. did you. Fact is Biden as president is doing a relatively good job. On all the evidence he is. Where will historians rank him? Ahead of the one you voted for twice, no doubt. What say you to that.
President Biden Is Turning 80. Experts Say Age Is More Than a Number.
The New York Times spoke to 10 experts in aging to paint a picture of what the next six years might look like for a person of the president’s age.
Experts say President Biden’s background and lifestyle are conducive to healthy aging. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg Nov. 19, 2022 ?????? ???????? [Read in different languages.]
WASHINGTON — President Biden has said it is a “legitimate question to ask anybody over 70 years old whether or not they’re fit” to serve in the White House. To those who question his fitness, he has a stock answer: “Watch me.”
On Sunday, Mr. Biden turns 80 — a number he tries never to utter in public. “I can’t even say the age I am going to be,” Mr. Biden said in a recent interview with MSNBC. “I can’t even get it out of my mouth.”
The New York Times spoke to 10 experts in aging to paint a picture of what the next six years might look like for a person of the president’s age. These experts have not examined or treated Mr. Biden, though they have looked at publicly available information, including a medical report issued by the White House last year, a day before his 79th birthday.
Mr. Biden, these experts agreed, has a lot going in his favor: He is highly educated, has plenty of social interaction, a stimulating job that requires a lot of thinking, is married and has a strong family network — all factors that, studies show, are protective against dementia and conducive to healthy aging. He does not smoke or drink alcohol and, according to the White House, he exercises five times a week. He also has top-notch medical care.
His race is another factor. The life expectancy .. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm .. for the average white, 80-year-old man is another eight years, said Dr. John Rowe, a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University. “And that’s the average,” Dr. Rowe said. “A lot of those 80-year-olds are already sick; they are already in the nursing home.”
--- Who’s Running for President in 2024? Card [9] of 9 [links inside]
The race begins. Four years after a historically large number of candidates ran for president, the field for the 2024 campaign is getting crowded once more, even as it is headlined by the same two aging men who faced off in 2020: President Biden and Donald Trump. Here’s a look at some of the contenders who have entered the race so far:
President Biden. The president has cast himself as a protector of democracy and a stabilizing force after the upheaval of the Trump administration. Biden is running for re-election as the oldest person ever to hold the presidency, a subject of concern among many Democrats, though the party has publicly set aside those worries and rallied around him.
Donald Trump. The former president is running to retake the office he lost in 2020. Though somewhat diminished in influence within the Republican Party — and facing several legal investigations — he retains a large and committed base of supporters, and he could be aided in the primary by multiple challengers splitting a limited anti-Trump vote.
Ron DeSantis. The combative governor of Florida, whose official entry into the 2024 race was spoiled by a glitch-filled livestream over Twitter, has championed conservative causes and thrown a flurry of punches at America’s left. DeSantis is Trump’s strongest Republican challenger since 2016.
Mike Pence. The former vice president is embarking on a long-shot campaign against Trump, his former boss. Pence was once a stalwart supporter and defender of Trump but split with him after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Chris Christie. The former governor of New Jersey is making a second run for the Republican nomination, setting up a rematch with Trump. Christie has positioned himself as the G.O.P. hopeful who is most willing to attack the former president.
Nikki Haley. The former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador under Trump has presented herself as a member of “a new generation of leadership” and emphasized her life experience as a daughter of Indian immigrants. She was long seen as a rising G.O.P. star but her allure in the party has declined amid her on-again, off-again embrace of Trump.
Tim Scott. The South Carolina senator, who joins a growing number of Republicans running as alternatives to Trump, is the first Black Republican elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction and has been one of his party’s most prominent voices on matters of race.
More candidates. On the G.O.P. side, Doug Burgum, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy and Larry Elder are also making a run for the White House, while Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have launched campaigns for the Democratic nomination. Cornel West announced a third-party bid. Read more about the 2024 candidates. ---
Scientists who study aging stress that chronological age is not the same as biological age — and that the two often diverge as people grow older. It is true that older people tend to decline physically, and the brain also undergoes changes. But in people who are active, experts say, the brain continues to evolve and some brain functions can even improve .. https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/some-brain-functions-may-improve-age — a phenomenon experts call the “neuroplasticity of aging .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6128435/ .”
“This idea that old age is associated with only declines is not true,” said Dr. Dilip Jeste .. https://dilipjestemd.com/ ,a psychiatrist who has studied aging at the University of California, San Diego. “There are studies that have been done all over the world which show that in people who keep active physically, socially, mentally and cognitively there is increased connectivity among specific networks, and even new neurons and synapses can form in selected brain regions with older age.”
Mr. Biden riding a bike on Kiawah Island, S.C., this summer. The White House says Mr. Biden exercises five times a week. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
No one can predict how a single individual will fare. The medical report the White House released last year was a summary of findings by the president’s longtime personal physician .. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/19/1057226411/harris-will-be-the-1st-woman-and-asian-american-to-hold-presidential-power-brief , Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, who proclaimed him a “healthy, vigorous, 78-year-old male.” But the White House has not released underlying lab documents, as Mr. Biden did when he was running for office; Andrew Bates, the deputy press secretary, said Mr. Biden would have another physical “in the coming months.”
Dr. O’Connor reported that the president takes prescription medicine to control his cholesterol and atrial fibrillation — an irregular heartbeat. He also noted two specific changes in Mr. Biden’s health: He had experienced “increasing frequency and severity of ‘throat clearing’” while speaking, probably due to acid reflux, and he had some stiffness in his gait.
Both are common in older people, said Dr. Dan Blazer, professor emeritus and psychiatric epidemiologist at Duke University School of Medicine. The same, he said, goes for Mr. Biden’s verbal stumbles — including the time he searched an audience .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/biden-jackie-walorski.html .. for a congresswoman, apparently forgetting that she had died the previous month.
[Some say we should use the word recall rather than memory in context as above.]
Once people reach 65, the risk of dementia doubles every five years, said Dr. Gill Livingston, a psychiatrist at University College London, who led a commission on dementia .. https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/fulltext .. in 2020 that was convened by The Lancet, a medical journal. In general, she said, in high-income countries like the United States, dementia will affect 10 percent of people aged 80 to 84 and 20 percent of those aged 85 to 89.
Mr. Biden did not undergo cognitive screening during his last physical, and experts are divided about its necessity for older adults. In 2019, the American Academy of Neurologists recommended .. https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/PressRelease/2748 .. annual screenings for those 65 and older because “age itself is a significant risk factor for cognitive decline.” But in 2020, a federal panel of independent experts declined to endorse it, saying there was not enough research to determine the “balance of benefits and harms.”
Several experts say doctors typically perform cognitive screening tests only when there is evidence of a problem; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser, who will be 82 on Christmas Eve and will soon retire from federal service .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/fauci-retire.html , said in an interview that he has never had one.
As the baby boom cohort ages, the number of octogenarians is growing into what experts have called a “silver tsunami.” In its 2020 Profile of Older Americans .. https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/aging%20and%20Disability%20In%20America/2020Profileolderamericans.final_.pdf , the federal Department of Health and Human Services reported that the 85-and-older population was projected to more than double from 6.6 million in 2019 to 14.4 million in 2040.
There is no shortage of octogenarians in public life. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was treated for colon cancer .. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/age .. when she was in her 60s and served on the Supreme Court until she died, at 87, of pancreatic cancer complications. Seven U.S. senators are in their 80s — including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 and 2020, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader — and one need only look to the chamber to see the variability in how people age.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, is obviously diminished at 89; she struggles to recall the names of colleagues and what happened in meetings. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, just won re-election at 89; he will be 95 if he finishes his term. Mr. Grassley is fond of tweeting videos .. https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley/status/1558957520227639296?s=20&t=s2ufrn61hg37KBMW3K-b-A .. of his early morning runs and sometimes does push-ups at public campaign events.
Mr. Biden boarding Air Force One after a trip to Bali, Indonesia, this week. The White House says Mr. Biden keeps up a busy pace, noting his recent international trips, but critics are concerned about the pace of the job. Doug Mills/The New York Times
“People in their 80s commonly experience declines; we shouldn’t be naïve about that,” said Lisa Berkman, a professor of public policy at the Harvard School of Public Health who studies health and aging. “And at the same time, there is so much variability. People who are doing well and are in the top level of functioning, have the odds of going for another 10 years, of doing really well during this time and making very important contributions.”
Mr. Bates cited Mr. Biden’s legislative achievements and the Democrats’ better-than-expected midterm outcome as evidence of Mr. Biden’s vigor, and said the president is in “good health and maintains an active lifestyle.” He also hit on the experience theme: “As Joe Biden has said since before becoming the most experienced president in American history, ‘watch him.’”
While experts are reluctant to diagnose Mr. Biden from afar — and there is no way to predict the future — those who have reviewed the available White House medical records said that so far, he appears to be aging in a healthy way.
Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, names both Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, who is 76, as likely fitting the profile of “super-agers .. https://today.uic.edu/new-study-finds-biden-trump-both-likely-to-be-super-agers/ ” — a “subgroup of people that maintain their mental and physical functioning and tend to live longer than the average person their age.”
As to whether age should matter in any election, Dr. Nir Barzilai, who is leading a study of centenarians and directs the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, put it simply: “Age,” he said, “is not something to consider on its own.”
A correction was made on Nov. 19, 2022:
An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Senator Dianne Feinstein. She is 89, not 88. The article also misstated the year in which President George H.W. Bush died. It was 2018, not 2014.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a Washington Correspondent covering health policy. In more than two decades at The Times, she has also covered the White House, Congress and national politics. Previously, at The Los Angeles Times, she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper’s Metro staff.
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