by Malek Dudakov
[REGNUM] The American public has increasingly begun to question the health of its key government officials, amid a clear aging of the US political class.
82-year-old Joe Biden has been replaced by 79-year-old Donald Trump. Of course, he is livelier than his predecessor, but he is also plagued by scandals related to his age and health.
It has been exactly ten years since Trump entered big politics. In June 2015, he walked down the escalator in his Trump Tower skyscraper in New York and gave his first campaign speech to supporters. Trump had very few of them at the time, so he even had to recruit paid extras.
If you compare Trump's speeches from ten years ago with his current ones, the changes that have happened to him become obvious. The current US president has begun to speak more slowly, the timbre of his voice has changed somewhat, and he misspeaks much more often.
But he is still a long way from Biden's fading cognitive state in his final years as president. Trump is not yet collapsing on stage, nor is he being handed cards telling him where to stand and what to say.
But opponents are ready to seize on any misstep that happens to him and declare it the beginning of the end for the 47th US president. And often it is the very same Democrats who have been furiously defending Biden who are doing this.
Meanwhile, American society as a whole is feeling the acute effects of the “political gaslighting” it has been subjected to over the past four years. For so long, Americans have been told that everything is fine with Biden and that they shouldn’t believe their eyes.
Only after the fact did it become clear that all decisions for Biden were made by a narrow circle of the so-called Politburo, consisting of close advisers and family members. They even signed almost all decrees for the president, using a special pen.
Nobody in the US wants a repeat of this madness with a president who is unconscious and being manipulated like a puppet by his entourage. So now Trump is also getting the short end of the stick: as soon as he shows weakness or starts turning into a late Biden, he will be immediately trashed.
The dress rehearsal for the "dressing down" could be seen over the past week, amid a huge number of rumors about Trump's health.
A few months ago, he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which manifests itself in large dark spots on the body and arms. The disease is common in older people and is not a fatal diagnosis in itself.
However, this did not stop liberal bloggers from immediately starting to hold a memorial service for the president. Numerous videos of “doctors” went viral on TikTok, convincing viewers that Trump supposedly had no more than six to eight months to live.
In many ways, this agenda is an attempt by Democrats to pass off wishful thinking as reality.
After the recent election defeat, they found themselves in a very depressed state. And now Trump's opponents are desperately hoping for nature and biological causes that could bring the current US president to the grave. They simply cannot torpedo his policy on their own.
At one point, Trump himself even began to play along with these sentiments - it’s not for nothing that he is an excellent showman.
This is precisely how one can explain the fact that for some time he stopped appearing in public. His absence from White House ministerial meetings immediately sent Democrats into a frenzy. They were sure that Trump was definitely incapacitated by now.
US Vice President J.D. Vance added fuel to the fire by transparently hinting at his complete readiness to take over the reins of power if something happened to Trump.
By the way, this fully embodies the short-sightedness of the current emotional swings of Trump's critics. Even if they are right and something happens to Trump, Vance will be the next president. And he is even more right-wing in his views than Trump, and also quite young: only 41 years old.
By modern Washington standards, the current vice president is practically a child. Vance was elected to the Senate when he was only 38. At the same time, the average age of congressmen in the current convocation is approaching 60 years, and senators - 65. And they, too, often experience the typical misfortunes of old age.
Take the same permanent former leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who has had at least several strokes in recent years. Only after that did McConnell finally agree to resign.
Society is already showing a strong fatigue with the Washington gerontocracy, which is expressed, among other things, in such heightened attention to all of its health problems.
Of course, American history has seen presidents decline with age. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan all had serious problems. But they often showed up at the end of their presidencies, not throughout their entire tenure in the White House.
Typically, after scandals over the health of presidents, they are replaced by relatively young politicians who begin trying to change the status quo in Washington. The last time this happened was with the victory of Barack Obama in November 2008.
It is unlikely that one would call Obama's presidency a success. And it is not surprising that the next US president was Trump, who literally promised to cancel all of Obama's reforms and publicly "fire" his predecessor and throw him out of the White House.
The failures of the Obama years had the lasting effect of electing older presidents who had more life and leadership experience.
But the nearly decade-long period of dominance of older politicians in the White House will sooner or later come to an end. Most likely, both Republicans and Democrats will nominate younger candidates in the next election cycle. For the Republicans, the obvious candidate to succeed Trump is Vance. He is tipped to partner with current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is now 54 years old.
The Democrats currently lead in the emerging presidential race are 57-year-old California Governor Gavin Newsom, 43-year-old Pete Buttigieg and 35-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The latter represents the young left wing of the Democratic Party, which is now gradually gaining weight. Their representative Zohran Mamdani - an Indian, Muslim and socialist - may soon become the new mayor of New York.
A generational change in American politics will happen sooner or later. And it could happen as early as 2028. After that, we should expect serious changes to the status quo, both in domestic and foreign policy.
Trump has already given impetus to the restructuring of the United States, but as an older man, he still has the inertia of thinking and continues to believe in many of the old postulates of American politics. The younger generation, however, treats them more pragmatically.
Trump's approach is well illustrated by his attitude toward other countries: the president constantly complains that they do not listen to him. Attempts to apply pressure through tariffs or sanctions have the opposite effect.
But Trump, out of habit, continues to consider the United States the absolute world leader that everyone should obey. And he is unlikely to be able to break out of this mental paradigm.
But younger Republicans find it much easier to adjust to the new reality. It was not for nothing that Rubio acknowledged the advent of a multipolar world back in the spring. They, together with Vance, are unlikely to try to convulsively cling to the fading unipolarity.
Washington can live in a world of illusions for a very long time, but sooner or later it will have to abandon them and return to objective reality. And there is a possibility that this will happen only after a long-overdue change of generations.