Jon Stewart recently made his return to “The Daily Show”, and it started with a bang. He made national headlines for his criticisms of both primary presidential candidates in the upcoming election. The main point he made was that both Biden and Trump are the oldest candidates to run for president in U.S. history, breaking the record age that they set themselves in the 2020 election. Stewart was targeted by both liberal and conservative news agencies and personalities over his assessment, but is he wrong?

Joe Biden is now 81 years old and will be 82 by election time. He has been targeted by his opposition for being too old since he first ran for president in 2020, and that is the strategy once again. He has slipped up many times already this year with general acts as president. Just recently Biden talked about meeting European leaders and mistakenly said he spoke to François Mitterrand, a French President who died in 1996, instead of the current French president Emmanuel Macron. 

This however was not a one-off mistake as Biden also mistook former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, for Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017. In 2023 he also mistook Iraq and Ukraine multiple times, calling the Russian war on Ukraine an “onslaught on Iraq,”, saying Russia is “clearly losing the war in Iraq,”and “a war in Iraq . . .excuse me, the war in Ukraine.”

Another sign of Biden's decline due to age has been his issues with falls and general oddities. By now most have seen the video of Biden falling off a bike or the several times he has seemingly walked off stage for no reason during speeches. 

Donald Trump at age 77 has nowhere near the amount of public gaffes that President Biden has; however, he has shown signs of age throughout the years. The most prevalent issue with Trump's age is the cognition tests he incessantly claims are extremely hard and he always passes them. The tests are not very hard as Trump would say, most cognition tests are based on the recognition of animals or words and the extent of math that is typically addressed on cognition tests is only counting down from 100 by seven. Bragging about passing these tests is not impressive, to say the least and the fact Trump brags about it shows he is worried about being perceived as senile. 

Trump also tends to ramble during speeches which makes him seem unaware of how long he has been speaking or how clear his message is. He does not make as many mistakes as Biden, but he has made them. In October of 2023, Trump referred to Viktor Orbán, who is the Hungarian prime minister, as the leader of Turkey. He also said that Orbán is a strong leader as he shares a border with Russia, even though neither Turkey nor Hungary shares a border with Russia. 

Trump and Biden are both older than the expected lifespan of males in the U.S. There is no reason why the citizens of the U.S. should have to choose between two elderly men who have both shown signs of mental decline and are at a severe health risk in their old age. If anything were to happen to either candidate while in office, it would put the U.S. in a very vulnerable spot and their words could have a huge impact on the way we are viewed globally.

There should be a solution so this type of election should not happen again. Since the constitution has an age minimum of 35 to run for president, a maximum should also be set to avoid results that have transpired in the past two election cycles. The precedent set by the minimum and scientific evidence of significant cognitive decline when people reach the age of 70 should allow for a maximum age of a presidential candidate.

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