U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington DC, 2025. (REUTERS)
Bulwark Managing Editor Sam Stein and Bulwark writer Lauren Egan say Democrats are reluctant to make President Donald Trump’s advanced age and health a political issue. Only they really should.
In Egan’s words: Trump is old. And he is a mess.
“We have all seen the signs of Donald Trump growing older,” said Egan. “He turns 80 next month. He has some weird bruising on his hands … and not only has he fallen asleep in the Oval Office. … He had an MRI last year but didn't really tell us why. He's not transparent about his health, which is obviously not exactly like a new thing for presidents. But after Biden we have all these questions. And he is he's old.”
Stein pointed out that Americans just lived through two years of “extensive, very aggressive” campaign against Joe Biden for being old and frail. But unlike Republicans and their right-wing propaganda networks, Democrats don’t appear to be up for some very easy payback against the slurring, sleepy president.
“The DNC is being kind of spicy in their Twitter account and in their TikTok account, but I think the problem for them is that their stuff just doesn't pop off in the way that it did with the RNC back in the Biden administration,” said Egan. “The RNC would clip something that Biden would do and … and it would go viral and basically the national press corps of people covering the White House would force these kinds of stories into the mix and people covered it.”
Egan went on to say that, rather than throwing up their hands, Democrats “do have a role to play in that they can force the issue” in to the pres.
“They can do things to get it into the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post in a way that Republicans really understand,” Lauren said. “Democrats like to play referee and they think that guilting you will like change something as opposed to trying to shift their strategy a little bit and force people to cover some of these things.”
Last said he recalled Republicans and their propaganda allies hammering Hillary Clinton’s email “every single day,” pushing topics such as email retention snafus into the front page because it's “all they're talking about.”
“Meanwhile, Trump's taking documents to his bathroom in Mar-a-Lago and no one seems to notice that everyone's on Signal. Who knows what kind of government retention policies they're practicing, if any, at the White House. Democrats aren't pushing that,” said Last.
But of course, there's only “so many hours in a day,” said Egan.
“You do have to make editorial choices. And if Democrats aren't out there forcing this, it's just an easier decision when there's all the corruption issues and everything else there is to cover. You understand why age might not always be top of mind.”
