When President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., shuffles to the podium Thursday night for his fourth and possibly final State of the Union address (SOTU), he will, whether happily or even knowingly, be checking off a list of SOTU superlatives, starting with the wince-inducingly obvious: Biden, at 81, is the oldest president to ever deliver the speech, extending his lead over 77-year-old Ronald Reagan in 1988. Donald Trump would have to win in November, then survive through 2027, to take that crown away.
It’s not just the age, it’s the wear and tear, as the last month’s worth of news, commentary, polls, and weirdo Biden performances have amply demonstrated. For instance, here’s a slice of the president’s Super Tuesday, just hours before his campaign romped to a 15-state Democratic primary/caucus sweep:
“I better not start the questions, I’ll get in trouble,” is not typical election-day messaging from any political candidate, let alone one who is currently trailing the guy he beat last time around in just about every national poll. But that has been the Biden campaign’s explicit strategy in 2024—keep the aging president away from reporters, away from unscripted gum-flapping, away from easy-earned media such as election-night speeches or the annual Super Bowl interview, and preferably flanked by minders who can take him by the arm before he again stumbles physically or verbally. White House insiders have called it “Operation Bubble Wrap.”
The prophylactic approach extends to the president’s own health, at least as publicly disclosed. Despite exhibiting signs of deterioration so obvious that even late-night comedians are starting to acknowledge it, Biden, amazingly, was not subjected during his annual medical exam last week to the kind of routine cognitive test that senior citizens with his memory profile (including Donald Trump) frequently undergo. I have watched a loved one take that test, and I can testify that a wrong answer to some of the questions, if widely shared, has the potential to sink an entire presidential campaign.
All of which accelerates a pre-existing trend that leads us to the next Biden State of the Union historical outlier: In the past eight decades of Gallup measuring presidential public approval, there has never been an incumbent in a re-election year to poll so abysmally before the big speech. Prior to this year, the record net disapproval rating for any such president was George H.W. Bush‘s -2 percentage points in January 1992 (46 percent positive, 48 percent negative).
Biden? He’s clocking in at -21:
Unlike some of those other names above (most notably Jimmy Carter, whose number there represents a brief rally-around-the-flag period in the first months of the Iranian hostage crisis, to be quickly reverted to his usual -20 doldrums), Biden’s unpopularity has been miserably stable since about the six-month mark of his administration.
(Gallup)
The Senate lifer who was a serial presidential failure before lucking into an elder-statesman veep slot under the charismatic novice Barack Obama, then emerged after a four-year interregnum as the plausibly electable normie in a 2020 Democratic field full of wild-eyed economic progressives and woke identitarians, maybe should not have relied on public affection lasting much past Inauguration Day. “What Biden overlooks—as does much of the press writing about Biden’s unpopularity,” Politico media critic Jack Shafer acidly observed back in December, “is that he was never a wildly popular figure nationally, so why should he be now?”
Whatever the underlying cause, the president’s persistent unpopularity, exacerbated by last month’s determination by Special Counsel Robert Hur that Biden should not be criminally charged for mishandling classified documents because potential juries would see him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age,” has become the negative fundamental in the Democratic Party’s quest to prevent a Trump restoration.
As political data analyst Nate Silver wrote on his Substack Tuesday, “Biden’s favorability ratings in 2020 were much stronger than Clinton’s in 2016: that’s why Biden won when Clinton lost. The problem for Biden is that his favorability ratings have since deteriorated—in fact, they’re now markedly worse than Trump’s, which have improved. Trump’s lead in head-to-head polls against Biden is a predictable consequence of this.”
Now that Nikki Haley is out of the Republican race, and the longshot legal bid to remove Trump’s name from some state ballots has been unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, Democrats have eight long months to face the unpleasant fact about their candidate. “Blessed with a lot of runway and faced with abundant evidence that voters have soured on Biden,” concludes Silver, who, like I, does not wish to see Trump win in November, “Democratic officials have mostly reacted with denial.”
Often, that denial degenerates into angry defiance, as the White House and its defenders lash back at the media for even talking about the issue, given the serially outrageous behavior of Donald Trump. After The New York Times published a poll this week showing that 73 percent of Americans—including 59 percent of Biden supporters—either “somewhat agree” or “strongly agree” that he is “just too old to be an effective president,” the ref-workers in the media criticism micro-industry kicked into overdrive.
“That they even asked this question is evidence of the bias—the agenda—in their poll,” City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis Threaded, as noted by CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter. “Who made age an ‘issue’? The credulous Times falling into the right-wing’s projection. This is not journalism. Shameful….NY Times, did you ask your random voters whether Trump is too insane, doddering, racist, sexist, criminal, traitorous, hateful to be effective as President?… This is not a poll. It is your agenda.”
(The same survey also asked respondents whether “Donald Trump is just too old to be an effective president,” which produced 42 percent agreement, including 18 percent from his own voters.)
A more insidious manifestation of this deflection strategy is the serial insistence by some Biden allies and journalists, as mocked by Saturday Night Live this weekend, that ACKshually the president behind closed doors is sharper and more vigorous than men half his age.
Media veteran John Harwood, while praising on Monday a recent New Yorker Biden profile written by Evan Osnos, stated that Osnos’s interview, like Harwood’s own from last fall, “shows [that] talk of [Biden’s] alleged mental decline [is] utter bullshit.” You just have to be in the room with him, man, then disregard all the contrary evidence and your own lying eyes.
Well, I’ve been in the room with the guy, too, and that yappy, self-confident, policy-fluent version from 2007 bears much less resemblance to Joe Biden in 2024 than does my contemporary 85-year-old father. For many of us who have watched old-age decline up close, the White House and media insistence that there’s nothing to see here amounts to brazen gaslighting, deepening a distrust for all things establishment.
These, then, are the stakes of Thursday’s State of the Union address. A president who has been shielded from the cameras for the past 12 months will be flying without a net for an hour in front of the biggest television audience he’ll see until the fall. A bubble-wrapping apparatus will be one ad-lib ramble away from having their protective cocoon fatally punctured. All while an anti-establishment presumptive GOP nominee waits in the wings, cackling.
Biden may yet pass the test—he has overperformed in high-stakes appearances in the past. And there are elements of Trump’s fundamentals, from fundraising to Dobbs-backlash to the size of Republican #NeverTrump sentiment, that are currently being underplayed. But the same Democrats who have been warning for eight years about Donald Trump’s erratic authoritarianism have now consciously chosen an unpopular nominee in obvious decline. The state of the anti-Trump union is weak.
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