Aging presidents

 WSJ article discusses pros and cons of aging presidents, but doesn't mention the accumulated wisdom of old age.

At 80, Trump Is Everywhere and Showing Signs of Age

By making the president an omnipresent figure, White House advisers are surfacing both vigor and flubs

By 

Annie Linskey

June 12, 2026 9:00 pm ET

President Trump, already the oldest man to become president, turns 80 on Sunday. Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

WASHINGTON—President Trump closed his eyes and appeared to nod off while seated in a suite this week at an NBA Finals game in New York City as cameras caught him snacking on french fries and pizza. He returned to the White House after 2 a.m.

By 10 a.m. the next day, he offered a lengthy critique of a recently published Wall Street Journal editorial to a reporter who called him on his cellphone, and said the downing of a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz “wasn’t a big deal.” Hours later, he ordered strikes on Iran in retaliation for the incident.

As Trump approaches his 80th birthday on Sunday, he and his advisers have made a strategic decision to turn the president into an omnipresent figure in American life, drawing a contrast with his octogenarian predecessor, Joe Biden. Trump makes regular marathon appearances in the Oval Office, he answers reporters’ cold calls and he tees off on social media at all hours of the day and night.

The result is that Americans are seeing more of both the good and the bad of an aging president.

In question-and-answer sessions that sometimes last more than 30 minutes, the president spars with reporters, delivering one-liners that ripple across cable news and the internet.

But cameras often zoom in on his bruised hands, stooped posture and closed eyes. And he sometimes trips over his words and confuses details. He has referred to Greenland as Iceland. He has called the Strait of Hormuz the Strait of Iran. And he has mixed up recent conflicts in South America and the Middle East.

Trump appeared to have his eyes closed this week when he attended an NBA Finals game in New York. Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The bruising on Trump’s hands stems from shaking so many hands, the White House says. Daniel Heuer/Reuters

The White House disputed reports that Trump fell asleep during the NBA Finals game, saying the camera angle was misleading, and blamed the bruising on his hands on frequent handshaking.

Trump is the oldest man to become president—taking the oath of office for the second time at age 78 and seven months old. Biden was five months younger when he was inaugurated. The Journal previously reported that Trump’s hearing has deteriorated, his skin is delicate, and he has resisted common treatments for the swelling in his legs. Between his last two annual physicals, he gained 14 pounds. 

Asked earlier this year about Trump’s aging, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R., Mont.) said Trump has slowed. “This job ages you,” Zinke said. “His pace isn’t as it once was.” 

To illustrate the point, he turned to an analogy about a football player running the 40-yard dash in 4.1 seconds. “When you run a 4.1, it’s like you’re lightning,” he said. “He isn’t a 4.1 anymore, he’s a 4.3. He’s still fast compared to every human on Earth.”

Trump was born in 1946—making him among the oldest members of the baby boomer generation who came of age in the post-World War II era and have reigned ever since as the wealthiest American cohort. And 1946 proved to be a magical year for America’s leaders: Two other U.S. presidents share the birth year, with George W. Bush’s 80th birthday in July and Bill Clinton’s in August.

Bush was 62 when he finished his two terms in office, and since he left, he has had two partial knee replacements and a stent implanted to address a blockage near his heart. Clinton was 54 after his two terms in office; several years after leaving, he had quadruple bypass surgery and later had stents implanted in his coronary artery.

Clinton has made occasional references to aging. Over the past three decades he has said that he has “more yesterdays than tomorrows” in his life. “I’m too old to gild the lily,” Clinton, then 78, said at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and noted that he was slightly younger than Trump.

Biden stands out as a warning about the hazards of aging in office. Born in 1942, he had sought a second term that would have put him in the White House until he was 86 years old. Biden and his team categorically denied signs of age-related decline before he dropped out of the race amid a party revolt following his alarming June 2024 debate performance. Shortly after leaving office, Biden was diagnosed with an advanced form of prostate cancer.

Reflecting on his predecessor’s decline in office, Trump recently said Biden is “the worst thing to ever happen to old people.”

The White House frequently schedules public Oval Office events with Trump presiding, many of which are followed by extensive exchanges with reporters. Ken Cedeno/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump proves his fitness for office by taking questions from reporters and maintaining what she called a “relentless schedule.” Leavitt provided a list of Trump’s past two weeks of meetings. The list details an average of more than two dozen calendar entries a day on weekdays, including calls and meetings with business leaders, advisers and cabinet secretaries. 

Trump plans to spend his birthday projecting the kind of youth and vigor he values—hosting a first-of-its-kind Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match Sunday evening on the White House lawn.

He lamented the upcoming milestone this week while talking to one of his top health advisers. “You don’t have to wish me a happy birthday because I’m not happy about that birthday that I’m having,” Trump said. “It’s not a number I like, but I’m here nevertheless.”

He has previously signaled similar dislike for the day.

“There’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear ‘Happy Birthday.’ You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist,” he said two years ago during a campaign rally in Nevada, interrupting the crowd as they began singing “Happy Birthday.”

The president has used an array of strategies to discuss aging, ranging from a touch of candor to flat-out denial. “I used to say, ‘I’m the youngest in the room,’” Trump told an audience earlier this year at Davos. “Now I’m among the older. I hate to say it. I don’t feel old.”

Trump told a group of retirees he addressed at the Villages in central Florida last month, “I don’t happen to be a senior—I’m much younger than you.” He has technically been a senior citizen since he turned 65 during former President Barack Obama’s first term.

“Wouldn’t you like to be my age? It’s young, vital, vibrant,” he told the gray-haired audience. “I’m much, much younger than the people in this room, but I feel I can relate to you anyway.”

‘There’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear “Happy Birthday,” Trump has said. ‘You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.’ Alex Brandon/Associated Press

The president is open about his fears of showing frailty—occasionally riffing about how much negative attention he would get if he stumbled on a set of stairs. “I’m very careful when I walk, by the way, because if I ever fall…that headline will go on for years,” Trump said at a recent Rose Garden event.

That concern added a touch of drama to a hot, smoggy morning during his recent trip to Beijing when Chinese Leader Xi Jinping greeted Trump at the Great Hall of the People—the Chinese government building that is accessible via a bank of roughly 40 stairs. No railings were in sight. Trump and Xi, 72, ascended about two-thirds of the way before the Chinese leader stopped Trump on a landing to take in the view of Tiananmen Square. They reached the top of the stairs without stumbling.

Some Democrats are focusing on signs of Trump’s aging, particularly the spate of videos showing the president with his eyes closed at meetings. “This is not something that’s normal, and the White House just has to come clean, explain to American people what is going on,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) said in an interview. 

Lieu raised the concerns during a recent congressional hearing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He played a video from a recent cabinet meeting where Trump appeared to nod off as Rubio spoke. “Imagine what he’s like when the cameras are not there,” Lieu said. Rubio disputed that Trump was dozing, calling Lieu’s concerns “absurd and ridiculous.” Trump, he said, “works day and night, long hours, every single day.”

The White House also pushed back on Lieu’s criticism, saying Democrats had no credibility to call out an aging leader after backing Biden for most of his term even as he declined while in office. 

“The Democrat coverup of Joe Biden’s decline remains one of the worst political scandals in modern American history,” Leavitt said. “President Trump and the White House have nothing to hide.”

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 13, 2026, print edition as 'Aging Poses Test As Trump Turns 80'.

history of meat

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Almost every great cuisine on earth was built on meat that had started to rot. Take the Romans. They seasoned nearly every dish in the empire with the liquid from fish guts packed in salt and left in the sun for three months. The sauce was called garum, and they could not get enough of it. It went on every table, from the cheapest kitchen to the emperor's own, the finest grades fetching more per jar than perfume. By any modern reading of the label, it was spoiled fish. The whole Mediterranean adored it, and its descendants are in your cupboard right now, in the fish sauce and the Worcestershire. Garum was no freak exception. Look at almost any traditional culture and you find a prized staple that a modern food-safety officer would condemn on sight. In Iceland they make hákarl, Greenland shark buried in gravel and fermented for months. The fresh shark is genuinely poisonous, so loaded with urea that eating it raw leaves you staggering as if drunk. The fermentation breaks the toxins down and turns a flesh that would harm you into a food that keeps for years. In Greenland the Inuit pack whole seabirds into a sealskin and bury it under stones to ferment. The Swedes tin fermented herring so pungent it has to be opened outdoors. And it is not only the far north. The British gentry hung their pheasant until the bird was frankly high, right on the edge of rot, because that was when the flavour was best. A dry-aged steak is beef left for weeks until a crust of mould forms, scraped off before the butcher charges you a small fortune. Controlled decomposition, and the connoisseurs queue up for the funk. None of this means your ancestors had iron stomachs you have somehow lost. You have the same stomach. You are simply frightened to use it. We entered the meat business as scavengers, long before we were good hunters, working over the carcasses other predators left and cracking the bones for marrow. The body still carries the receipt. The human stomach runs at a pH of around one and a half, as savagely acidic as a vulture's, sitting right down among the dedicated eaters of carrion. That acid is a weapon. It evolved to destroy what breeds in a dead body before it ever reaches your gut. You are built to handle meat well past fresh. Which puts that little date on the packet in its place. The sell-by date is a recent commercial convenience, not a cliff edge beyond which food turns to poison at the stroke of midnight. The honest part, because it matters. Fermentation and ageing are controlled transformations, a world away from mince forgotten in a warm car. Some spoilage is genuinely dangerous, and a few of these traditions can kill if done carelessly. The skill was always in knowing the difference. But a species that built rotted-fish sauce and fermented shark into its proudest cuisines was never going to be felled by a steak two days past its date. This is what you are for. They were scavengers with the gut to match. And so, under all the shrink-wrap, are you.

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Nobody talks about the single greatest wealth hack of the modern age, so I'll break it down for you, free of charge.

Cut out everything that grows. Grains, seed oils, fruit, veg, the lot. Eat only what walks, swims, or comes from something that does.

First, the basket. The bread, the cereal, the pasta, the crisps, the £6 oils, the daily meal-deal, the greens powder, the fibre you bought to fix the fibre. Four grand a year, gone.

Then the medicine cabinet. Antacids, bloating tablets, laxatives, the odd GP visit. Another two.

Compound that at 8% for thirty years and you're north of half a million pounds.

But we're only getting started.

You stop sizing up in trousers, so there's a wardrobe you never replace. You're no longer slumped and bloated on the sofa for two hours every evening, which, billed at your hourly rate, is quietly a second salary.

That reclaimed energy gets funnelled into your career. You're promoted purely because you stopped eating toast. Corner office by forty, conservatively.

Factor in the decades added back onto your life, each one earning and compounding, and you are now, technically, immortal and extremely liquid.

Your great-grandchildren inherit a private island, founded on the morning you put the sandwich down.

Most people will scroll past this. The wealthy already understand it.

Eat Fat and Grow Slim

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

In 1958 a British doctor handed the nation the reason it was getting fat. It thanked him by forgetting he existed. His name was Richard Mackarness, and before medicine he trained as a painter, studying under Mervyn Peake, the man who wrote Gormenghast. Then he changed course, qualified, and wrote a book with a title that still reads like a dare. Eat Fat and Grow Slim. The subtitle was cheekier still: Banting Up to Date, a nod to the Victorian undertaker who had cured his own obesity on meat and fat a century earlier and been ignored for it. Mackarness was picking up a thread the establishment had spent decades pretending not to see. His claim was simple and, to the dieticians of the day, outrageous. The thing fattening Britain was the carbohydrate, the bread and sugar and refined flour that humans had eaten in real quantity for only the thinnest sliver of their existence. Fat was close to innocent. He called the alternative the Stone Age diet: two million years as hunters, a few thousand as farmers, and a body that never got the memo about the switch. He was also writing on borrowed time, in the last years before the official war on fat: before the advice that swept dripping and butter from British kitchens and poured in margarine and industrial seed oils. He defended animal fat at the exact moment the establishment was lining up to condemn it. He had met the men doing this work too, crossing to America in 1958 to sit with the doctors he called the anti-cereal doctors, Donaldson among them, comparing patients who were losing weight while eating like lords. Then he pushed past weight altogether. As a psychiatrist at Park Prewett in Basingstoke he set up one of the first food allergy clinics the NHS had seen, and suggested something properly heretical: that some of the depression and fog filling his waiting room came straight off the dinner plate. He wrote it up in 1976 as Not All in the Mind, a title aimed at every colleague who had ever told a patient it was all in theirs. The verdict was a polite, immovable no. Not accepted, not adopted, filed under eccentric, while the nation was told to eat its wholemeal toast and fear the butter. The book sold anyway. People tried it, felt the difference, and never quite worked out why their doctor looked pained when they mentioned it. Mackarness died in 1996. The thing he was mocked for, that refined carbohydrate rather than fat sits behind much of modern metabolic disease, is creeping back into respectable conversation as though no one had said it first. Somebody did. He trained as a painter, and he saw the picture fifty years before the rest of the room.

Base reality

 

Interstellar

@InterstellarUAP

Elon Musk dropped a reality-shattering truth: “There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality” He explained: "40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. Now we have photorealistic 3D simulations... If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will become indistinguishable from reality." Reality could be rendered before our eyes & our world could be an ultra advanced simulation.

XSpirit

@TubeSpirit

·

3h

Philosopher Nick Bostrom laid out a compelling statistical argument years ago that at least one of three propositions is likely true: civilizations go extinct before creating ancestor simulations, they choose not to run them, or we are almost certainly living in one. The rapid progress from basic games to hyper-realistic environments today lends weight to the third option. Some physicists point to the universe's mathematical nature and quantum information theory as possible signatures of underlying computation. This doesn't dismiss our experiences as fake - it reframes them as part of an incredibly advanced construct, perhaps one with purpose we are only beginning to glimpse