Former President Donald Trump is just three years younger than President Joe Biden, whose advanced age has voters of all persuasions concerned. The 80-year-old incumbent is already the oldest sitting President, but if Trump were to defeat Biden in 2024, Trump would be the same age as Biden, 82, when their respective terms ended.
[NOTE: Next on the eldest executive branch leaders list, Ronald Reagan was 77 when he left office and lived to be 93.]
Trump likes to portray himself as having nothing in common with Biden, despite their similar ages and — according to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News — their similar lack of popularity with voters.
[NOTE: Polls are notoriously untrustworthy, but Biden’s popularity numbers are lower than those of other peacetime incumbents presiding over robust economies and low joblessness, as he is. And in polls that query a broad section of voters — not just MAGA — more than half said they would not vote for Trump, and that’s according to right-leaning New York Post.]
Former Congressman and federal prosecutor — and current Fox News personality — Trey Gowdy, who has “bedeviled partisans by sometimes refusing to toe a pro-Trump line,” is among a small subset of Republican voices willing to consider that the leading candidates of both parties could be replaced by better ones. [NOTE: Gowdy endorsed Trump in 2016, after Marco Rubio dropped out.]
Trump hit the outrage button on the subject this weekend, blaming Gowdy and other Rupert Murdoch-employed narrative-makers (at the WSJ) for reporting that his unpopularity is similar to Biden’s. Trump claims that he has a “90% Approval Rating.”
Trump’s vituperative rebuke attempted to counter the “narrative” of his unpopularity, which he says is nothing like Biden’s:
“The Wall Street Journal and FoxNews keep pushing the narrative, through Trey Gowdy and others, that ‘BOTH’ Crooked Joe Biden and 45th President Donald J. Trump are unpopular within their own Party. This happens to be true for Crooked Joe, where they won’t even let RFK Jr. have his votes fairly counted (more RIGGING, and STEALING Elections!), but VERY untrue for ‘TRUMP,’ where I have a 90% Approval Rating, and am crushing the ‘second tier’ candidates by 50, 60, and even 70 Points. THAT’S POPULAR!”
