Too Damn Old

If there's one thing we should have learned about the election of Donald Trump (and Ronald Reagan), it's that there should be a mandatory retirement age for presidents.

Reagan, famously, was suffering from Alzheimer's even before he left office at the age of 77. Trump, at only 72, is clearly suffering from some sort of cognitive deficit (probably Alzheimer's, which his father died of).

So it's ridiculous when we read articles like this one, saying that John Kerry "is not ruling out" a presidential run.

John Kerry would be 77 on inauguration day in 2021. That's too old. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 77-year-old man is 9.9 years. Seems okay, right? Until you realize that the last 10 years of your life are the most precarious, filled with heart attacks, strokes, atherosclerosis, cancer, blindness, deafness, dementia and broken bones that occur in rapid succession until one of them kills you.

To make things worse, John Kerry lost the last time he ran, and he was never a charismatic candidate to begin with. He got the nomination because it was basically "his turn." Other elderly potential candidates aren't much better off.

Bernie Sanders would be 79, with a life expectancy of 8.8 years. At that age, there's a 5.3% chance of him dying in his first year, a 5.9% chance in the second, a 6.5% chance in the third and a 7.2% chance in the fourth year.

That's too damn old. Sanders would spend every single day of his presidency dealing with serious health issues.

Elizabeth Warren would be 71. As a woman her life expectancy would be 15.7 years. She's probably still too old, but based on the numbers, it's a reasonable risk. But at that age a woman's bones are usually very brittle: a fall coming down the stairs of Air Force One could literally kill her.

And it's not just death and dementia that are the issue. Yes, the elderly have a great deal of experience. But they also have difficulty assimilating new information, have slow reaction times, do not handle stress well, and suffer from diminished hearing and vision.

The elderly cannot even get a good night's sleep, and drugs that induce sleep only make things worse, as was highlighted when George H. W. Bush was discovered using Halcion.

A sleep-deprived septuagenarian should not have their finger on the nuclear button.

Therefore, the Constitution should be amended to put a mandatory retirement age on the president and members of the Supreme Court. The age of 70 seems like a good number.

It's unlikely that such an amendment will never happen, though Trump may be the impetus we needed to get it passed. So voters and parties should simply reject elderly candidates out of hand.

Lest you complain about age discrimination, the Constitution is fine with age limits on office holders: members of the House must be at least 25, senators must be at least 30 and the president must be at least 35. The Founders deemed people younger than those ages not competent to be president.

Before the advent of modern medicine retirement age wasn't really an issue: if you weren't physically and mentally fit to be president, you just died. But medical treatment has extended the human life span beyond the age at which one is competent to be president.

If you can be too young to be president, you can certainly be too old.

One could argue that a candidate who passes a rigorous physical and mental examination should be able to serve longer. The problem with this is that there are no real standards for what is required of a president.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessement administered to Donald Trump proved he could copy a cube, name a camel, rhino and lion, and knew what time 11:10 is. Wow. He's a stable genius!

When I was younger I thought the idea of mandatory retirement was wrong. But now that I'm 61 and have more elderly friends, I know first-hand that no 75-year-old is fit to be president, and certainly no 80-year-old is. I have known many septuagenarians -- some of them stronger and fitter than myself -- and six months later they were dead from a stroke or a heart attack.

People at that age should be out golfing, or puttering in the garden or bouncing grandchildren on their knee. Not setting trade policy, or trying to run a war in Afghanistan. Or having Twitter beefs with NFL players.