Like the little boy who pointed out that the emperor was naked, veteran US politician Mitt Romney has just voiced an uncomfortable truth that everyone knows, but few wish to utter: America is being run by men who are too old for office.
At seventy-six, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts and presidential contender is no spring chicken himself, but in announcing that he is retiring from being the junior senator for his native state of Utah, Romney called on both eighty-year-old President Joe Biden and seventy-seven-year-old former president Donald Trump — who is running for a second term in the White House — to follow his example and step down to make room for a new generation.
The gentlemanly Romney — who ran and lost as the Republican presidential candidate against Barack Obama in 2012 — avoided any outright attacks against his fellow oldsters, but merely said that it was time for them both to go.
Romney is surely right. Both Biden — whose every public appearance is now a cringe-making embarrassment, on account of his manifest senile decay — and Trump, whose bile-fueled campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024 is little more than a personal grudge match against his many enemies — are men of the past entirely unfitted for the responsibility and burden of the presidency in the future.
At a time when America’s position as leader of what remains of the western world is facing unprecedented threats from China and Russia, along with the challenges of new AI technologies, these two elderly has-beens, marinated in the twentieth-century politics of yesterday, are not what the world needs today or tomorrow.
It is, however, a sign of the ongoing tragedy of US politics, that neither Biden’s Democrats nor the bitterly divided Republicans are likely to take the slightest notice of Romney’s wise words. Both the Washington incumbents and the GOP have locked themselves into absurd positions from which there is no obvious escape.
Though polls show a majority of Americans — Democrats as well as Republicans — know that Biden is already too old and frail for the presidency and want someone else in the White House, neither he nor his handlers are listening, as there is no other candidate around who is sure to beat Trump in 2024.
If Biden were to step down now on health grounds, Vice President Kamala Harris would automatically be elevated to the Oval Office even though she is even less popular than Sleepy Joe. “Cackling Kamala” has demonstrated an ignorance of global politics that is both awesome and dangerous. If she were to succeed Biden and run next year, polls show she would likely lose — even against Trump.
Meantime, Trump himself, though less obviously incapacitated by his age than Biden, is cruising towards the Republican nomination, even though he is facing a host of criminal charges arising from his first term in office that could well see him fighting next year’s presidential campaign from inside a Georgia prison cell.
It is a nightmare situation, but seemingly one from which neither party is yet willing to wake.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
