Why Joe Biden thinks he's never too old to be your president
Dirck Halstead/Getty Images; Howard L. Sachs/CNP/Getty Images; Nathan Howard/Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/Insider
- If Biden wins a second term, he would be 86 when he leaves the White House in 2025.
- As the oldest sitting president, he's raising concerns about how long he can continue governing.
- But allies say he's motivated by his agenda, patriotism and stopping Trump's return.
- Read more from Insider's "Red, White, and Gray" series.
REHOBOTH BEACH, Delaware — About six years ago, Joe Biden and an old friend were talking about what they planned to do with the rest of their lives.
Biden, then in his early 70s, was finishing his second term as vice president. He had already decided against running for president in 2016 after losing his son Beau to brain cancer. Political retirement seemed imminent.
But his friend says he'll never forget Biden quoting a line from a Dylan Thomas poem about defying death: "Do not go gentle into that good night."
"It was a window into how he views his role," said his friend, a former staffer who was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly about the president. "As long as he feels like he's healthy and capable of contributing, he's going to do that, and he's not going to go quietly."
Biden, of course, would run for and win the presidency in 2020. And as he approaches his 80th birthday, he's become a Rorschach test for the effects of aging on a world leader.
Republicans have questioned Biden's cognition, even if he's just three years older than former President Donald Trump, who himself is angling for another White House bid in 2024.
"Nobody believes that Biden's going to run again," Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Insider in late spring. "He's obviously diminished and not able to do the job."
But allies insist Biden is still the guy he's always been, capable as ever and the right leader for the moment, regardless of his age.
Across a half-century in federal politics — a 36-year Senate career representing Delaware, two terms as vice president, and three bids for the presidency — Biden has outlasted many of those he leaned on and grew up with in private and public life. He's tragically lost a wife and two children. Only two other men from his freshman Senate class are still living, and they're both in their early 90s, having long ago left politics. His longtime chief of staff, who succeeded him in the Senate, has literally written a book on retirement.
Yet Biden heeds Thomas' poetic words: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
He has said he expects to run again in 2024, as long as he's in good health. If he wins, he would be 82 on Inauguration Day — becoming the oldest sitting president and breaking the record he set in 2021 — and 86 upon leaving office.
"If Joe believes that he can continue to contribute and move this country forward, he'll do it again. And he should," said South Carolina state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a Biden donor and former state party chairman whose wife, Jamie Lindler Harpootlian, is the Biden-appointed US ambassador to Slovenia.
Biden's allies say he's motivated by advancing his agenda, by his sense of obligation to the country, and by fighting the same forces that got him in the 2020 race.
"He sees himself as wanting to do everything possible to stop Trump's return," Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, told Insider.
Biden has already cheated death by surviving brain aneurysms at 45. "It just makes you think about ... every single day, you don't know. You'd better take advantage of the day," he told me in 2008 when he was running for vice president.
If Biden is thinking about age now, he doesn't seem focused on it as a barrier.
He loves to tell the story of Satchel Paige, a longtime Negro Leagues pitcher who debuted in the American League at 42 and once threw three scoreless innings at 59.
Last year, Biden visited the Vatican and shared the story with Pope Francis, who at the time was nearly 85 and six years older than Biden.
"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" the president said, quoting Paige. Biden added with a smile, "You're 65, I'm 60."
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
'Watch me'
Age has been a part of Biden's story for decades, ever since Delaware voters first elected him to the US Senate in 1972, days before his 30th birthday.
He is the sixth-youngest person elected to the chamber. As Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, "Promises to Keep," he looked so youthful that the secretary of state at the time, Henry Kissinger, once mistook him for a staffer.
Biden used his age to his advantage to win that race. He ran ads that pitted his generation's ideas against those of an opponent more than 30 years older. One ad boasted that Biden "understands what's happening today" — a not-so-oblique suggestion that his Republican rival, incumbent Sen. J. Caleb Boggs, did not.
Decades later, in 2020, Biden said on ABC that it's "a legitimate question to ask anybody over 70 years old" whether they're fit and ready to be president. Responding to Trump's attacks on his mental acuity, Biden said, "Mr. President, watch me."
As evidence of Biden's command, allies point to his recent legislative achievements. He signed a bipartisan infrastructure law, huge climate and healthcare legislation, a law to bolster the US semiconductor-manufacturing industry, an expansion of healthcare for veterans exposed to burn pits, and significant bipartisan gun-safety legislation. US drones took out Al Qaeda's leader under his watch.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who's emerged as a leader on gun-control measures, said Biden's experience matters, adding there are people in their 40s "who couldn't pull off anything close to what he's done." Murphy described Biden as "nimble" and credited him with knowing when his team should step back from day-to-day negotiating with Congress.
Murphy said that after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Biden was part of the White House's "very hands-on role."
"He learned from that experience that obviously did not result in a bill and recalibrated," Murphy said.
But Biden's accomplishments have often been overshadowed by the ongoing legal drama and related defiance of the man he defeated to win the White House. Republicans — including Trump — have gleefully seized on Biden's verbal misadventures, such as when he called his vice president "President Harris."
They mocked him for falling off his bike in June in Delaware — even though Biden got back up, talked about gun control, and then rode away.
They blame him for inflation and crime. They say he's "hiding" from journalists because of his infrequent news conferences and one-on-one interviews, though he's had more than 200 impromptu exchanges with reporters.
"The person in the Oval Office is not the Joe Biden we knew in the Senate," Cruz, who ran for president in 2016, told Insider.
Biden's gait is undoubtedly stiffer and his hair whiter than during his Senate days, which ended in January 2009 when he resigned to become Barack Obama's vice president.
When an Associated Press reporter talked about getting gray hair, Biden jokingly replied: "At least you're keeping it. I'd settle for orange if I had more hair."
But Biden notably fielded questions from reporters for more than two hours in January on legislative priorities, inflation, foreign policy, and COVID-19.
"I just don't buy that Joe Biden is, you know, a doddering old man," said Jeff Weaver, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ran against Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary. "If that's the message of the Republicans, I mean, it's false. Whether they can sell it to the American people is another question."
Nicholas Kamm / AFP via Getty Images
'He's engaged'
People around Biden take pains to show he's fully capable of doing the job the presidency entails.
Cedric Richmond, a former senior White House advisor, told Insider that Biden is "handling a grueling schedule," sometimes requiring 10- and 14-hour days, and reading a fat briefing book each night to prepare for the next day.
"In meetings, he's asking detailed questions, thorough questions, because he's already read the briefing material," said Richmond, who's now a Democratic National Committee senior advisor. "You have to be prepared when you meet with him. And he's going to quiz you on what's there: How does it affect the American people? The average person? How does it move the agenda forward? Are there any consequences? What kind of studies have been done?"
On domestic and international trips, a White House senior aide said, staffers often give Biden scheduling options, and he takes on the heaviest load. "We'll say, 'This piece isn't necessary, and you don't have to do this event, and you could probably skip that,' and he'll say, 'No, absolutely not,' and wind up putting it all back," said the aide, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Khanna said he isn't concerned about Biden's age. "He'll call if he watches you on a good television appearance or will remember things that you've said to him about priorities," the congressman said. "He's engaged."
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images
A promise
Staying engaged is an implicit part of a promise Biden says he made when Beau was coming to terms with dying.
Beau, who died in May 2015, asked for his father's word that he would be OK, Biden wrote in "Promise Me, Dad."
"It didn't mean I had to run for president," Biden said on "Morning Joe" in 2020, "but he was worried I'd walk away from what I'd worked on my whole life, since I've been 24 years old."
Biden, especially of late, appears particularly engaged in efforts to stamp out the possibility of a nation again led by Trump.
In a recent primetime speech from Philadelphia's Independence Hall, Biden targeted Trump and declared that MAGA Republican "extremism" threatened the country. The president made the comments shortly after Trump told a radio-show host that he was "financially supporting" people accused of crimes related to the Capitol riot, adding that he would look "very favorably" at pardons for them if he were to run and be reelected in 2024.
"He sees Trump and Trumpism as an existential threat," said Biden's friend, who defined "Trumpism" as "mindless craziness."
"He sees Putin and Putinism as an existential threat," the friend added. "And he thinks — and I think he's right — he's the best person to deal with both of those issues."
Jim Watson, Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Biden has said he was persuaded to run in 2020 when he heard Trump say there were "very fine people on both sides" of a violent clash in 2017 between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one woman dead.
Khanna said the possibility of Trump running again is "weighing" on Biden.
"It's not just the next generation of Republicans," Khanna said. "It's someone who literally has done so much destruction, damage to our democracy."
Doug Brinkley, a presidential historian, said that as Biden enters the second half of his first term, he likely has a "messianic streak, a feeling that 'the country needs me.'" Democrats are united in their opposition to Trump, Brinkley said, and "Biden's the one that can say, 'I already slayed that dragon, and I'll slay him again.'"
But Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who challenged Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, said that running for president is "a rigorous thing — it's a hard thing."
Biden "turned out to be the one person out of 330 million people that could beat Donald Trump, and he has my gratitude for that," Bennet said.
Asked whether he wants Biden to do it again, the senator demurred.
"That's for him to decide."
Fountain of youth
If Biden has a fountain of youth, it would be found in Delaware, his Joe-asis.
He's traveled there about 50 times during his presidency, according to Mark Knoller, a former CBS News reporter who has long been tracking presidential data. It's where he sees friends and family and goes to church. It's where buildings and sandwiches are named for him, where he's still getting takeout from the Charcoal Pit in Wilmington, where people know him as just Joe.
"Every time I get a chance, I go home to Delaware. You think I'm joking. I'm not," Biden said in February.
Biden sightings have long been a regular part of life in the tiny First State. On a recent visit to Rehoboth Beach, I was greeted — and searched — by Secret Service agents outside a bookstore. The first lady, Jill Biden, was inside shopping.
"I'm on vacation," she said when I asked if we could talk. "I'm not even me."
Nicole Gaudiano/Insider
Ruggerio described the idea that Joe Biden is diminished or can't remember things as "bull crap."
"He was just in his glory talking to people that he has some association with," Ruggerio said. "I was observing it and thinking, holy crap, he is still the way he's always been, where he's super interested in a person, he wants to know the details, and he wants to make a personal connection, and it's real."
It's a BFD when Biden's in town. Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat who has been working alongside Biden for nearly half a century, once missed his train to Washington, DC, and had to Zoom into a Senate hearing because Biden's presidential motorcade had snarled traffic in Wilmington. At Rehoboth Beach, where Biden keeps a vacation house, a banner airplane that wasn't supposed to be flying recently caused a stir, Ruggerio said, and a military jet like "something out of Top Gun" flew over his house, spooked his dog, and "scared the shit out of everybody."
As we spoke, Ruggerio noticed Secret Service agents peering through the window of the Robin Hood restaurant where we were eating. We later learned the first lady was heading to the bookstore across the street. We agreed that the White House bubble must be killing Biden.
"He lives off of that, the interaction with people," Ruggerio said.
At the Delaware State Fair in Harrington, Darlene Cox, a retired state employee, showed me a 2019 picture of herself with Biden. She said Biden won her over decades ago when, about a year after their first meeting, when she was pregnant with her youngest son, Biden remembered to ask whether she'd had a boy or a girl.
"That's amazing to be able to have that rapport with people," she said.
Cox said people are painting Biden as "an older man that's senile" and it's not true. "If he's willing to run I'd support him," she said, "because I truly believe in Joe."
But one of her sons, D.J., a tractor-trailer driver who's running for Kent County recorder of deeds as a Democrat, feels differently.
Strolling the fairgrounds in his campaign T-shirt, he said he was feeling the effect of Biden's low approval ratings on his own campaign. "It's made it harder, yes," he said.
D.J. Cox said that while he thinks Biden is "still Joe" and still capable, he worries that Biden's age is a problem.
"How can a politician represent me and my family when they're that old?" Cox said. "You can't be as sharp as you were at 50 and 40."
Laura Najemy, an attorney from Wilmington who supports Biden, said the president could get beyond questions about his age by showing at the end of four years that people are living better, are safer, and have a better chance to save money.
But she also said Biden should hold more live press conferences to show that he can handle scrutiny.
"It's very hard to argue that your opponent is not able to handle the pressure of being president when he's very clearly handling a press conference well, with grace and humor and very knowledgeable insight about the issues," Najemy told me during an interview at the state fair.
In Newark, Delaware, at the Biden Welcome Center off I-95, some travelers expressed sympathy for Biden.
Patricia Mantoan, 51, said she was glad to see his name on the center "because he's getting, I think, a tough rap." She added that age doesn't matter and that "of course" she would vote for Biden again.
Andrew Beyea, of Odenton, Maryland, said Biden has good goals but is a victim of a polarized political environment.
He voted for Biden in 2020, but would he again?
Beyea sighed deeply.
"He's really old," he said. "I don't know how much left he's got in the tank."
'Healthy' and 'vigorous'
Biden's latest publicly released medical report, from November, described him as "healthy" and "vigorous" and said he was "fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency."
Kevin O'Connor, the presidential physician, also said Biden was being treated for atrial fibrillation and gastroesophageal reflux that causes him to clear his throat more often. He said that Biden's gait appeared "perceptibly stiffer and less fluid" than in the past and that Biden experienced spinal arthritis.
"Old age should burn and rave at close of day," the poet said. But for how long?
The average life expectancy for a 65-year-old American man in 2020 was 82. A YouGov survey in January found that, as presidents and senators serve into their late 70s and 80s, 58% of Americans said they'd support an age maximum for elected officials; 39% of those respondents said that age should be 70 and 24% said it should be 60.
Young voters — who once helped propel Biden to his Senate seat — are now a problem for Biden. In a New York Times/Siena College poll in July, 94% of Democrats under 30 said they'd want a different presidential nominee. And nearly two in three voters who indicated they were planning to participate in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary said they wouldn't want Biden to be the nominee.
Age and job performance were part of the problem.
"With this disappearing middle class that we've got going on, I don't think he and a lot of the other politicians in his age range really understand what that looks like as a young person with that being your future," Winchester Kelly, 29, a Democrat from Richmond, Virginia, visiting the Delaware State Fair this summer, said of Biden.
Many politicians in Biden's age group are "out of touch with what young people need financially," she said, and Biden would get a "resigned sort of 'this is what we got'" level of support if he runs again.
Biden, who declined through the White House to be interviewed for this story, bristled when a reporter asked about the Times poll in July.
"Read the polls, Jack. You guys are all the same," he said, approaching the camera. "That poll showed that 92% of Democrats, if I ran, would vote for me." (The poll suggested he would get 92% of Democrats' support in a matchup with Trump.)
People in Biden's close circle are "absolutely not" telling him to take it easy, a senior White House aide told Insider.
"I would pity the person who would say to him, 'You should think about slowing down,'" the aide said. "He is as aggressive as ever."
But outside of his close circle, people around Biden's age are increasingly concerned about a second term.
David Gergen, 80, a former presidential advisor, questioned whether it's "appropriate for the country's sake" to have a president in his 80s. He told Insider that Biden and Trump should both sit out 2024 and let a younger generation step up.
"What if we're going to be in a fight over Taiwan?" said Gergen, who served under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. "Do we really want somebody in their 80s who's making those calls about what to do? I don't think so."
Gergen said he is also worried about Biden's physical health at that age.
"What happens if Joe Biden has a heart attack? What happens if he has a stroke?" he said
Robert Reich, who served as the labor secretary during the Clinton administration, wrote for The Guardian in July: "It's not death that's the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It's the dwindling capacities that go with aging."
At 76, Reich said he was "feeling more and more out of it." He blamed his generation of leaders for having "f*cked it up royally."
He concluded: "Joe, please don't run."
In 1995, another towering figure, South African President Nelson Mandela, faced a similar decision: run for a second term, or retire.
Mandela chose the latter.
"I don't think an octogenarian should be meddling with political affairs," Mandela said. "I would like to give over to a younger man. I will be available for advice if they want me, but to occupy a position as a head of state, definitely, I won't take that risk."
'I ain't dead yet'
Presidents tend to "cling" to power, Brinkley said. Lyndon B. Johnson, the last president to opt out of running for a second term, in 1968, was in a "disastrous situation" during the Vietnam War.
"Being president is in Biden's DNA," Brinkley said, adding that roles such as as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or even as vice president were "stepping stones to the ultimate achievement."
"The idea of relinquishing power by Joe Biden over the age issue is extremely remote," Brinkley said.
In 1988 and again in 2008, Biden tried but failed to win his party's nomination, and he didn't abandon the idea of running in 2016 until close to the end of his vice presidency.
Johanna Maska, an Obama White House aide, remembers Biden as vice president "just going around and chatting with people" — and talking for hours with political donors about running for president.
"Everybody knew he wanted to run, and a lot of people didn't think he was the right person" because of his performance in Iowa, said Maska, now the CEO of the Global Situation Room, a public-affairs agency.
Biden concluded after his son died that he had run out of time to launch a winning 2016 campaign — a decision he said months later that he regretted. By the time he ran in 2020, journalists were asking about his exercise routine and the possibility of a maximum age for candidates.
"What the hell concerns, man? You wanna wrestle?" he told a reporter in 2019 who'd asked whether Biden would release his medical records "to address concerns."
"I think you guys are engaging in ageism here," he said in January 2020 during an interview with The Times' editorial board. "Now look, all kidding aside, I don't think they're — the voters will be able to make a judgment."
During that interview, he complained that he was being declared dead politically despite leading in the polls.
"Guess what?" he said. "I ain't dead. And I'm not going to die."
—New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) January 20, 2020
Unauthorized T-shirts and hoodies with this quote — as well as a picture of Biden in his signature aviators licking an ice-cream cone — are available on Amazon.
While campaigning in 2020, Biden called himself a "bridge" to a new generation of Democratic leaders. But he never defined how long that bridge would be. He told ABC that he didn't mean he was running for only one term, just that he was committed to building the Democratic bench.
To run for office and be elected so many times shows that "you're very competitive," said Jim Manley, who was a longtime aide to Harry Reid, the late Senate majority leader.
"And it's going to take a lot for you to, you know, take a step back and/or step down," Manley said.
Maska, the former Obama aide, said that while Biden was a "good solution to Trump," it's time for new Democratic leaders.
"He's been a political leader longer than I've been alive. And I have a son who's now 10," she said.
But Ruggerio, who has known Biden for more than two decades, said he doesn't see the president passing the torch in 2024.
"I just think it's ingrained in him at this point," he said. "He's been elected since 1972, when he was 29, and now he's going to give it up?
"I don't see it happening," Ruggerio added. "Why should he?"
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