According to the Social Security Admiration, the normal retirement age is 67. At this point in people’s lives, they’re focused on what trips they’re going to take, what they’re going to do with their grandkids or simply what new hobbies they’ll start with this new found freedom. For Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden they’re focused on how they’re going to run the country.
The US News and World Report shows that in the past eight years we have had the oldest presidents in the history of our nation. President Joe Biden will end his presidency at the age of 82 and President Trump will end his 4-year term at 83, making these two the oldest presidents ever. With this has come its own sets of issues.
It’s no secret that the older we get, the slower we get cognitively. We may not be able to learn skills and curriculum as easily or may become more forgetful. The national institute of health shows that the average in which cognitive decline starts to take full effect is 70 but this number can vary. Cognitive decline could start as early as 50 and is almost impossible to predict when it will happen. The problem becomes apparent when we examine the ages of our presidents.
As they keep getting older the threat of cognitive decline becomes worse and worse. A major example of this is President Joe Biden. During the 2024 presidential debates, President Biden made such claims that Vladmir Putin was the Vice-President of the United States and that the real Vice-President, Kamala Harris, was the President of Russia, not Putin. These problems led the Democratic party to withdraw Biden as their candidate and instead make Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee.
While older presidents also suffer from mental issues aside with age, they also start to lose the trust of the people that elected them into office. According to the US Census Bureau, 1 in 6 people are over the age of 65 or only 17% of the population. This means that these past two presidents have only supported 17% of the population. Why is our country allowing this precedent of older and older presidents to stand?
The main way to address this critical issue is by implementing presidential age caps for office. The most ideal cap would be 70 based on the average start of cognitive decline. I do not stand alone in this belief however, as 79% of the US voter age population feels the same way, as shown through an article released by the Pew Research Center.
These age caps would not only assure that we would minimize the risk of a President becoming mentally and physically incapable of running our country but would have the other benefit of increasing diversity of our nation’s leaders. We could see younger presidents and with them a wider range of ideas based on the majority of the population, not the minority.
While we cannot actively make Congress put in legislation adopting this cap, we can take actions now to ensure that our nation’s leaders are fit for office. Before you cast your vote, do your own research. Not only look at what the ads are telling you, but also what the outside evidence and research also state and take age into consideration when casting your vote. Change will never occur if we do not make our voices heard.
