When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he was the oldest person ever elected to be president of the United States. Donald Trump, re-elected in 2024 for a second term, is now the oldest person elected to be president of the United States. The third oldest was Ronald Reagan who, though several years younger than Biden or Trump, showed signs of mental decline in his second term and a few years after leaving office announced to the nation, in a gracious way, that he had Alzheimer’s Disease.
Biden’s apparent mental and physical decline is being chronicled in a new book released in May and will be in other books to follow. His debate performance against Trump in June of 2024 is widely seen as disastrous to his campaign, leading to his decision not to seek re-election. Some people are seeing similar patterns in President Trump. In late May Biden revealed that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which seems to be increasingly common for men of his age. (I am 78 as I write this and know the statistics; many of my contemporary male friends have been found with prostate cancer.)
Our constitution has a minimum age requirement to become president, 35 years. But it has no upper limit. Should it? I have never thought so, but now I am increasingly open to moving in that direction. Politicians in most cases have considerable difficulty stepping away from office. David French in a column in the New York Times in May, 2025, held up Justice David Souter as something of a model for retiring from the Supreme Court at a reasonable age. Souter retired at age 69 after serving for 19 years. He went to his New Hampshire home and lived out his remaining years in commendable ways and died at age 85.
I retired at age 66 after holding the same job for 38 years. I was in good health, mentally and physically; I could have easily served several more years. There was no pressure put on me to retire. But I was aware of the toll of years of demanding work and wanted to walk away rather than be carried away. In my retirement I have been able to hold part time jobs that I found and find meaningful, but not nearly as taxing as the full time work I once did. While demanding some adjustments in my life, my retirement, now in its 13th year, has been a wonderful chapter in my life journey.
Should we amend the constitution to establish an upper age requirement for running for president? Maybe it is time to do so. I suggest that no one be allowed to be inaugurated as president past that person’s 75th birthday. That would have precluded a first term for Biden, and a second term for Trump. I think that would have been wise for the health of our country. That leaves a window of 40 years for people to run for president, which is more than generous.
Sailing toward Wisdom 