One of the senseless ironies of our time is that more people seem to worry about President Joe Biden’s age — 81 — than about the immaturity of Donald Trump, who is pushing 78.
Yes, immaturity. That’s the most telling difference between Biden, whose wisdom and judgment are undiminished by his age, and the former president, whose entire persona is a constant tantrum more befitting an out-of-control toddler than an erstwhile leader of the free world.
For more people to mind Biden’s age than Trump’s shows what bombast and bluster can do to camouflage what really matter: Wisdom, judgment, discretion, intelligence, emotional maturity and integrity. Or the lack of them.
I’m older than both. I’ll be 87 in April, which I’m told makes me the oldest journalist still writing for a Florida newspaper. So, I take it personally when foolish people equate age with dementia and youth with undiminished capacities.
No one is born with wisdom. It comes with age, but not to everyone. Physically, the knees and hearing go first. So does the ability to retrieve facts like names and dates, even when you see in your mind what you’re looking for. The neuroscientists say that’s normal and has nothing to do with wisdom.
Wisdom, in truth, consists in large part of knowing what to look up. I learned long ago not to trust to memory anything important enough to be fact-checked.
Emotional maturity and judgment come with age as well — for some people more than others.
Accepting only for argument’s sake that Biden is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — to quote Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s uncalled-for description — I would much rather have a forgetful mensch in the White House, a statesman who never forgets his principles, rather than someone who has never troubled himself with having principles.
The nation is better off with a president who forgets dates than with one who never forgets whom he hates.
Emotionally, Trump never outgrew having learned from his parents that he could have and do anything he wanted. That’s why he can’t bear losing. Mary Trump, his niece the psychologist, diagnosed that perfectly in her book about him.
But you don’t need her book to see that. His behavior speaks volumes. It nearly brought this country down on Jan. 6, 2021.
The special counsel’s language was, in the light most favorable to Hur, a rationalization for not indicting Biden over classified documents that remained in his possession after his vice presidency. By linking his age with failing memory, however, Hur has brought out effective rebuttals from people who actually know something about the subject.
“As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets,” wrote Charan Raganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and director of its Dynamic Memory Lab, in the Feb. 12 New York Times.
“In fact,” he wrote, “most of the details of our lives — the people we meet, the things we do and the places we go — will inevitably be reduced to memories that capture only a small fraction of those experiences.”
(That’s why many people kept diaries and some still do.)
Although memory begins to decline in one’s 30s, Raganath wrote, “age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential depending on the reasons it occurred.”
Inability to recall a specific word — which is familiar to all of us — is what most memory experts would call “retrieval failure,” he explained, meaning “that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it.” It’s not the same as forgetting the entire memory of something important.
“Remembering that an event took place is different than being able to put a date on when it happened, the latter of which is more challenging with increased age,” Raganath wrote.
Biden remembers and respects what should matter most to a president, especially the Constitution and our nation’s hard-won economic, political and military leadership in an increasingly dangerous world.
Trump relishes his contempt for all of that, joking about planning to be a dictator and encouraging Vladimir Putin and his forces to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t spend enough on their armed forces.
“It is the kind of statement that can only come from a deranged and twisted mind,” responded General Wesley E. Clark, a former NATO commander. “The lives of every American, both in uniform and civilian, are at severe risk if Donald Trump wins this election.”
Trump’s contempt for citizens who didn’t cheat their way out of military service, as he did, ought in itself to disqualify him. John Kelly, the retired general who was one of his chiefs of staff, has described him as “the most flawed person I ever met.”
Benjamin Franklin was 81 — Biden’s present age — when he wrote the most important address to the convention that wrote the Constitution in 1787. His body was crippled by gout but his wisdom and judgment were unimpaired.
He didn’t like everything in the proposed Constitution, but he doubted the convention could agree on a better compromise “and I am not sure that it is not the best,” he said.
It would serve the people well, said Franklin, “and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”
Are we there yet? We’ll find out on Nov. 5.
Martin Dyckman is an editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel.
