Caffeinated Politics

My best friend reminded me this week of a note he wrote to Democratic members of Congress, urging them to encourage President Joe Biden to step aside concerning the 2024 election. I should note that it was done even before the deeply wounding debate that left the nation shaken. With that reminder, I am curious if Republican members of Congress are being contacted by constituents with a similar point regarding Donald Trump. After all, aging is not partisan and does not reverse itself. Unless we are talking about Benjamin Button.

What we are watching play out in real time is the serious mental decline and loss of capabilities of Trump. While too many of his faithful base pretend that everything is fine, that nothing has changed, and that the man in front of them is exactly who he was ten years ago, the rest of us know that this is simply and demonstrably not the case.

There is a reckoning coming; it is on the horizon. The aging issues that are clear and present for us to see with stupefying statements and behavior exhibited by Trump should be the red warning lights for the Republican Party to take action. The slippage with Trump is accelerating. It is compounding. It demands attention.

Look, I do not care if you adore the autocrat or deeply despise him. The uncomfortable truth is that the same biological math applies to tyrants as they do to Joe the plumber, who is a union man. But with a president, we all must pay heed to this issue, as the job is punishing. We cannot, as a nation, perform the same pantomime as his base of supporters and pretend not to notice what’s right in front of us. Pretending not to hear the rambling, the digressions, the moments where the thread snaps and the sentence wanders off into the weeds. Pretending not to see the physical slowing, the cognitive stumbles, the unmistakable signs that time is doing what time always does.

The silence is so much louder this time. Because Republicans spent years insisting Biden was too old, too frail, too diminished for the office. They built an entire rhetorical universe around the idea that America needed someone sharper, stronger, more vigorous. Now they’re confronted with an even worse image of Donald Trump showing the unmistakable signs of steep decline. But stop, Mr. Blogger! This topic is off‑limits. It’s impolite, Mr. Humphrey, to mention his cognitive slippage. Aging is only an issue when a Democratic president sits in the Oval Office.

I know a bit about this larger issue of aging. I have always been a slim guy, lanky as a teenager, and somewhat the same in adulthood. Being small, I guess, made me a bit emboldened at times. I attended the first meeting as a freshman to try out for the football team (not weighing 100 pounds), but the coach said no way. Years later, when it came time to get stranded cars out of snowbanks, I was the first one to offer a shoulder to the trunk, pushing. No one was going to say I was not big enough. About five years ago, that caused a hernia (repaired with surgery), and though I still have the spirit, I no longer run to each needy neighborhood driver in winter. That is the lesson I wish to impart about Trump.

Aging is undefeated. It does not negotiate. It does not care about party loyalty, cable‑news narratives, or the emotional needs of voters who want their political hero frozen in time. It comes for everyone, and it comes faster than we expect. Or want.

Trump is aging with severe results. What we must ask ourselves is whether we, as a country, are capable of acknowledging what we see every day, every hour, in many cases. There is no doubt that the world is watching, too. Our allies are watching. And yes, our enemies are watching. They’re assessing whether the United States is still capable of confronting reality, or whether we’ve become so emotionally entangled with a deranged political figure that we can no longer say the obvious out loud.

At some point, someone must break the silence. Maybe I did.