the oldest man in the room
In most U.S. states, commercial airline pilots are legally required to retire at 65, bus drivers face a mandatory reassessment at 79, and air traffic controllers must retire at 56. Donald Trump is 79. He is, at this current moment, the oldest ever sitting President, overtaking Joe Biden, who by the end of his tenure could barely string together a sentence. The law won't allow a man of Trump's age to fly a 747 over Florida, to drive a bus full of kids through California, or to process radar blips above JFK, but it is perfectly happy to let him decide whether or not to launch cruise missiles at Tehran.
The President of the United States of America is, in no particular order: supreme commander of the most lethal military apparatus ever assembled, with the ability to end civilisation with a single phone call; steward of the world's largest economy; chief diplomat to every nation on earth; boss of four million federal employees; and nominator of the judges who decide what the Constitution means. Decisions taken by them affect roughly 343 million people. On any given day of the week, he may be required to absorb classified intelligence briefings about multiple countries, recall in a phone conversation the precise commitment he made to the Prime Minister of South Korea fourteen months ago, and decide whether a blip on a radar screen in the Pacific is a weather balloon or the beginning of something much worse. It is, by any measure, the most cognitively demanding job in the history of human society.
At 79, the mind is ill-equipped for such responsibilities. This is not an opinion; it is scientific fact. Decision-making, problem-solving, planning and multitasking — also known as the executive cognitive functions — decline with advancing age. The prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that handles impulse control and consequence-weighing — that small and crucial pause between thinking something and acting upon it — is one of the first regions of the brain to show structural deterioration.
Trump's loyal subjects are quick to dismiss any criticisms of his age. He's in excellent health, they say. He functions just fine, they say. Look at him at the rallies, they say. But the proof, as it were, is in the pudding. A shift in Trump's speeches toward shorter sentences, more tangents, more repetition, and more all-or-nothing thinking has been observed since 2024. On one occasion he stated that his long-time acquaintance Joan Rivers had told him she voted for him in the 2016 election. Joan Rivers died in September 2014. And this is just one example in a long list of worrying gaffes.
Allow me to caveat, as I had to my wife, who gave me a stern look, thinking I was excusing Trump's behaviour on account of old age. I'm not, for a second, suggesting that every catastrophic sentence to tumble out of Trump's mouth is the product of a shrinking brain. The man has shocked for decades. He has been taking catastrophic decisions since the 1970s. Let's lay out a few of them, so we can remind ourselves of the sheer stupidity of large swathes of the American population that voted him in. Trump bankrupted six businesses — including, somehow, a casino, an establishment literally designed to ensure that the house always wins. He ran a fake university that defrauded thousands of students and cost him $25 million to settle. He spent years demanding the execution of the Central Park teenagers, a position he arrogantly maintained even after DNA evidence exonerated them. And lest we forget, the small matter of attempting to overturn a democratic election while a mob he personally wound up like a clockwork toy ransacked the Capitol. This is not decline. This is character — or more accurately, the absence of it. For homework, I'm assigning a some light reading of the Epstein files to help you build a a more in-depth picture of the man's personality.
Trump has one operating principle, which he has adhered to with monastic devotion throughout his life: how can I fill my pockets and electrify the public while doing it? His chaotic manner is not incompetence; it's a smokescreen. While the world gasps in horror at whatever fresh outrage he has just donated, the quiet business of self-enrichment continues undisturbed. And so, back to the issue of cognitive decline. It doesn't explain Trump; it makes him more dangerous. A self-interested operator with an inflated ego in the Oval Office is dangerous enough — Bush, Nixon, LBJ, history provides the examples — but the same operator, now with impulse control degrading and the filter between thought and action growing thinner by the year, is something more alarming. And this should keep us up at night, because, as we have seen, decisions taken by the U.S President affect us all.