President Donald Trump, 79, just showed us he needs a chair lift — and probably a new companion, an analyst wrote Thursday.
Joanna Coles, The Daily Beast's chief creative and content officer, described how Trump appears to be struggling on his own to climb up and down stairs while "officials waiting below held their collective breath not out of awe, but out of risk assessment."
It became clearer as he descended the steps from Air Force One that he "might suddenly fall away" as he made several stops along a tour through Asia.
And after 60, she explains, "a fall is the express lane to decline."
But the biggest difference between Trump and the other aging presidents before him is that he seems to lack a partner to help him.
"President Donald Trump, 79, doesn’t stride off planes anymore. He negotiates with them," Coles writes. "And on this latest Asian tour, the person whom we assumed would be at his side, Melania, the world’s most famously disengaged First Lady, was once again conspicuously absent. One begins to wonder if she’s in hiding, or holed up writing a sequel to her memoir. Either way, the man is alone."
It's clear he needs some extra help, she adds.
"Let’s drop the pretense: Trump needs a companion. Not a Secret Service agent, not an aide with a golf bag or a nuclear football, a proper, old-fashioned companion. The kind elderly countesses once employed to push them around the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, fetch their shawl and gently spoon them bouillabaisse," Coles writes.
"He doesn’t need another campaign manager. He needs an aide to keep him upright and make sure he leaves the stage via the correct exit."