Senility in High Office

The Economist: “What President Joe Biden’s cingulate cortex looks like is not public information. Both he and Donald Trump were assessed in 2020 by Jay Olshansky, a gerontologist at the University of Illinois, and a team of colleagues, using what information was available. They predicted that the probability of either man surviving the presidential term both were then seeking was more than 90%. For both of them, that was several percentage points more than the actuarial average for men of their age.”

“However, high office takes a toll, and even superagers must eventually deteriorate. The trouble is that they often fail to accept this fact. And the people around them, whose jobs may depend on the big guy keeping his, have every incentive to deny or conceal it. The British public was kept largely in the dark about Churchill’s fading capacities. American voters were blithely unaware when they re-elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 that his doctor doubted he would survive another term. Aides to Jacques Chirac, France’s president from 1995 to 2007, were evasive about a stroke he suffered in 2005.”

“Dictatorships are especially prone to denial and deception. If the leader is erratic but still in control, aides are scared to tell him (despots are nearly always male) that he is not as sharp as he was. If he loses his grip, the aides have a chance to wield power themselves by controlling access to the throne.”