This is going to be a response to Nate Silver’s piece, since it is the most coherent argument I’ve seen for caring about Biden’s age. Nate is wrong and Biden’s age is no more legitimate a concern than Trump’s.
Death Probability
Nate starts by talking about their chance of death. He shows this graph, which shows p(death) for white men ramping up significantly around trump
Taking the graph literally, Trump’s probability of dying in his next term would be about 23% (eyeballing the numbers, 1-.95*.94*.93*.93), while Biden’s would be about 30% (again eyeballing 1-.93*.92*.91*.9). Which is not that big a difference.
Except we know that Trump is obese while Biden is not. And we know that Trump doesn’t like seeking medical help / listening to doctor’s, while Biden is fine with it. And we know that Trump had a pretty severe case of covid. And we know that Biden is ~totally healthy, while Trump has both released much fewer health details and we have reason to be skeptical of the medical details we do have because we know that they were lying at least about his height. Put all these details together, and I reckon Trump’s chance of dying in office is roughly the same as Biden’s. Both of which are much less than the 23/30% above because they are pretty healthy and receive state-of-the-art medical care.
Cognitive Capacity
I don’t really think voters are concerned about them dying. Voters are concerned about declining cognitive capacity.
First let’s address Alzheimer’s. Nate cites statistics about how Alzheimer’s risk rises dramatically at the age Biden and Trump are at, such that the difference between them actually become significant. At first glance, this seems like a decent point:
Except had Nate spent more than 5 seconds looking into this stuff, he would have learned that Alzheimer’s risk varies dramatically by sex. Risk for men is both lower overall and rises much more slowly with age:
That source is too noisy to be able to accurately estimate risk. Let’s try to do it instead with this graph, coming from a less-cited study:
Eyeballing it, it looks like Biden’s risk of developing alzheimer’s in his first term is about 8%, while Trump’s is about 4%. Which I guess is some difference.
Except let’s be honest, voters aren’t actually concerned over a 4% delta risk of alzheimer’s. They are concerned because they think Biden is already senile while Trump is not. This is fucking absurd.
Literally just listen to a Trump rally and a Biden speech. They contain about the same amount of coherent speech. The only difference is that when Biden misspeaks, he tries to get back on track, so it comes off as a clumsy mistake, while when Trump misspeaks he just leans into it and goes off the rails. Voters perceive the former as worse than the latter, even though it’s clearly more important *for the duties of the president* to be able to get back on track. Biden also has the excuse of a life-long stutter that Trump doesn’t have, if we’re trying to use their speech to suss out dementia. (And no, judging by their speech, neither of them have dementia).
Journalists also see to forget reading/writing cognitive capacity when discussing this. Trump rambles conspiracy theories into his Truth Social account all day long, seemingly with no ability to write complete sentences. He squiggles circles onto hurricane maps when they don’t adhere to reality. I expect his ability to read important government documents to be significantly worse than Biden’s.
And even this analysis is perhaps giving voters too much credit. We know, just from observing the content of his presidency, that Biden has better cognitive abilities than Trump. Trump would fly off in tangents during national security briefings. He would ask advisors the dumbest questions ever. His white house was in total chaos due to his organizational skills. He enacted a muslim ban with seemingly no forethought, done so haphazardly that the Supreme Court struck down his first two attempts at this before he finally issued a version that complied with basic legal logic.
Edit: I forgot to mention here all the reporting that republicans have found Biden quite sharp in private.
The Report
And finally we turn to the report. The report that said that Biden did not violate national security laws while Trump did, and yet still somehow ended up being bad for Biden. The “sympathetic, well-meaning old man” thing has been misreported by the media and was not actually a phrase the special council used to describe Biden.
The actual substantive criticism of Biden’s memory came in the following text:
Let’s go through it carefully.
The first three sentences claim that Biden “did not remember when he was vice president”, and by that they mean he asked the question of whether he was vice president in the years 2013 and 2009. It is very likely, based on how he behaves in speeches, that these were just slip-ups before he got back on track and addressed the substantive matter at hand.
Then they say that he did not remember, to within several years, when his son died. Again, what probably occurred is that it came up, and then Biden cited a year when his son died that was off by a few years. I’ll just cite Paul Krugman’s nice response to this:
Then they say that he misremembered the details of the Afghanistan war, including which general he agreed with in the debates. This just seems perfectly understandable? It was 13 years ago, he probably hasn’t talked to any of these generals since, it seems natural that his memory of the specific details is hazy.
Remember that this is a five-hour interview where Biden was being specifically investigated for criminal activity and which took place at a time where Biden was caught up in dealing with Israel. Biden was obviously very stressed, and probably sleep deprived, and probably wasn’t totally focused on remembering the exact specifics of the Afghanistan war debates from Obama’s first term.
Remember also that this special council is some random Republican attorney whose resume makes you question how he ever got appointed to this position. This wasn’t some broadly respected figure like Robert Mueller.
And so, on the question of “how much should you update on Biden’s cognitive capabilities from this report?”, the answer is “not much”.
You might still think covering Biden’s age is important. You might think it’s important because voters are (wrongly) concerned about it. You might think it’s important because setting Trump aside it’s a legitimate concern, and if it’s also legitimate to be concerned about Trump then they should cover Trump’s age as well.
First, on the duty of the media to cower to voters’ concerns: this is bullshit. If voters are wrong to be concerned about something, the media is wrong to cover it. The role of the media should not be to feed voters’ every base instinct. A lot of voters think climate change isn’t real, the media should not put out climate denial pieces. A lot of voters think the 2020 election was stolen, the media should not put out election denial pieces. A lot of voters think the vaccines were not safe, the media should not put out antivaxx pieces.
And on the proper solution being to cover Trump’s age more: this is a bad excuse. The media is not going to cover Trump’s age more, because it doesn’t appeal to voters’ predispositions. And politics is a zero-sum game, so if you don’t cover Trump’s age much, you shouldn’t cover Biden’s, or you are making it hard for voters to make a rational decision.
Politics isn’t a fucking game, journalists have an important job to do, and they are failing in that job by covering Biden’s age. It’s the 2016 email scandal all over again.