Donald Trump spent four years as president and — unlike almost all of his predecessors — came out of it seemingly without aging, a Washington Post columnist wrote Monday.
The reason for that, stated Matt Bai, is worrying.
“I think it’s fair to say that the strain of the presidency shows itself in pretty much everyone who leaves the office — in worry lines in the face, gauntness from lack of sleep, creaking backs and failing knees,” he wrote.
“Ronald Reagan, who was about Trump’s age when he left office, hurtled into Alzheimer’s disease. Lyndon B. Johnson died a frail man at 64, just four years after leaving the White House. Bill Clinton, who was only 52 when he completed his second term, developed a serious heart condition soon after.”
But Trump at age 78 shows few signs of advanced age.
“Trump is, objectively speaking, old,” he wrote. “There are moments when he really seems it. Maybe you’ve seen this YouTube video of him hitting the links with pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau. Trump spends much of the time wheezing through his words, his waxen face pulled tight; he reminds me of Christopher Walken in 'Dune.'
ALSO READ: 'Has he met his boss?' Vance mocked after complaining about Dems turning tables on the GOP
“But you know, he’s still golfing at 78 — and pretty well at that. And Trump still managed to give a convention speech last month, largely extemporaneously, that ended up being more like a filibuster. Sure, he ranted and meandered like a guy you might cross the street to avoid if you saw him downtown after dark, but there’s nothing new about that."
“There’s no escaping the fact that Trump still seems a good deal younger than Biden. He appears to be nourished by a bottomless wellspring of rage.”
And, Bai argued, his apparent youth comes because the true cause of a president’s decline is not the late nights or the workload — it’s the awesome responsibility for other people that sits on their shoulders.
And Trump, Bai said, just doesn’t care.
“ I’m trying not to be cruel here, but it’s not exactly breaking new ground to say that he seems to lack for something innately human — the basic capacity to internalize other people’s pain,” he wrote.
“As president, Trump never betrayed remorse or apologized, never seemed to take personally the 800,000 Americans who died from the coronavirus on his watch. Tragedy breeds in him only defiance. Trump’s motto might be: 'Don’t worry, be angry.'"
"When Trump and his children talk about the sacrifices their family made to serve the public, they aren’t talking about his anguished nights spent roaming the halls of the White House. They’re talking about money."
“The point is that empathy and self-doubt — the feeling that we’re failing to meet the critical needs of others — are the things that really take a toll on us. Whereas clinical callousness may well be a fountain of youth — from which Trump’s been guzzling his entire life.”
