Nate Silver Calls Donald Trump ‘Way Too Old’ To Be President

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Elections analyst Nate Silver called Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “way too old” to be president in a post published on his Substack Friday, while also arguing that President Joe Biden deserves more scrutiny over his decline.

Silver began by observing that progressives have been pushing for more media coverage of Trump’s age and conceding that he didn’t see anything wrong with Trump’s recent decision to turn a rally into a jamfest. “Philosophically,” however, he stated his support for “the effort to press the media on this story.”

“Trump is 78 and is seeking the presidency until he’s 82. That’s way too old, given the demands of the job. Considering the long history of old presidents seeking to hold onto power when they were clearly diminished — there were many such cases before Trump and Joe Biden — we should probably just have a Constitutional amendment that says a president can’t be older than 75 on Inauguration Day,” wrote Silver.

“The problem, of course, is that if Trump assumes office again, he’ll be essentially the same age as Biden was at the start of his current term. (Trump would be 78 years and 220 days old on Inauguration Day; Biden was 78 years and 61 days old in 2021.) And there’s an extremely high overlap between people who critique the media for not covering Trump’s age enough and those who scolded it for covering Biden’s age too much,” he added.

Silver, who has openly acknowledged his preference that vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris succeed Biden as president, took a lot of flack from Democrats for suggesting that Biden should consider dropping out of the 2024 race well before Biden actually did.

“If the media should be covering Trump’s age more, it should probably still be covering Biden’s age more, too,” he submitted on Friday. “He may not be a candidate for president anymore, but he’s the leader of the free world in a dangerous time facing multiple simultaneous crises from Ukraine to the Middle East.”