Does the difference in Trump and Biden age coverage come down to party politics?
It’s been almost exactly two years since the late June evening when I realized I was double booked and opted to live-blog the presidential debate between Biden and Trump instead of seeing Sleater-Kinney at Summerfest. On the one hand, serious regret. On the other, I’m not sure I would have ever fully understood what happened at that debate had I not seen it on my own in real time.
As several books and countless news articles pointed out, this was the event where Biden’s age really became a central, unavoidable focus. Biden stumbled and misspoke and sounded confused and raspy. Trump, though only a few years younger than Biden, sounded energetic and clear – as he made a number of demonstrably false claims about his record, Biden’s record, and other things. But Biden’s age and health became the main story. I don’t need to go into all the details about what was said and what happened; this was the beginning of the end of Biden’s candidacy, and we know how 2024 unfolded from there.
Now Trump is president and the signs of aging are not subtle: observers have seen physical signs, the president falling asleep in meetings and in other unexpected public venues, and, of course, the outbursts and rambles that have gotten worse and more alarming as the term has gone on.
In 2024, this question did some attention; Pew Research Center did a study on how people perceived media attention – the partisan breakdown was about what you would expect, with each side feeling their candidate got the worst of it. An analysis from the Penn Media Accountability Project confirmed that in 2024, there were important coverage differences. For example, the study’s author notes, “From the tone of these headlines [about Trump winning in 2024], Trump winning the election at his age is framed as an accomplishment and not a liability.”
Some have argued that the issue with Biden aging had to do with the perception that Democrats, and the Biden campaign, were hiding something and being dishonest. The Trump administration, by contrast, conducts its offenses against transparency in plain view. So, again, the question is why.
I’ve been arguing since 2016 that Trump has benefited from the way the news media depicts the presidency, which is very individualistic and premised on fairly shallow notions of weakness and strength. Trump’s bombastic style has fit right into these expectations.
But, unsurprisingly, I think it also makes sense to look at this through a party lens. One reason is that this might give us a sense of why there was a market for these stories about Biden’s age, and why Democrats reacted strongly to it in a way that Republicans haven’t for Trump. The simplest difference is that the Democratic coalition is younger on balance – Democratic presidential candidates have won with younger voters (usually defined as 18-29) since 2004, and the party has an edge with this group. Data bear out the stereotypes: the Republicans do better with older voters, even if this age gap didn’t play out exactly as expected in the 2024 election. Biden’s age was one more thing placing him at odds with the diverse party he was trying to lead, and Democrats seem to have had a uncomfortable relationship with this state of affairs. Watching Biden show signs of age did not help.
Another possibility cuts against the usual narratives about how distinct Trump is as an individual, how he leads a cult of personality, etc. These things can still be true – but he’s also a highly transactional figure for a movement. In a sense, this comes down to different ideas about descriptive representation in each party coalition: evangelicals and other movement conservatives gravitated toward Trump not because he was one of them, but because he promised to do what they wanted. He delivered on that promise in the first term, smoothing the path to the second with these crucial constituencies. The basic asymmetry between the parties can help to explain why each party demonstrated different levels of tolerance – maybe even demand – for stories addressing the age of their respective presidents and candidates.
What the different party coalitions are looking for in their leaders might explain some elements of the larger media picture, and how coverage of each of these very old leaders differed. But this specific strain of coverage might also be considered a subset of how news media have talked about the two leaders in general. These differences, too, seem to go back to party, and to assumptions about power that are tacitly built into media coverage.
Republicans represent groups who are assumed to hold legitimate power; Democrats represent groups who are not. Challenging these elements of the status quo runs the risk of violating journalistic norms about neutrality, while affirming the status quo does not. (Someone made this point in an excellent way somewhere online and I now can’t remember who said it or where I saw it.) So part of what drove the discussion of Biden’s age was that the former president was showing up, flawed, to advocate for policies on behalf of the poor, people of color, LGBTQ Americans. Trump, on the other hand, uses unconventional methods to advocate on behalf of the existing structure of power. For Biden, there was a higher burden to explain and justify. For Trump, some outbursts and rambling can still fit the script. And the messenger is hard to separate from the message.
None of this is to suggest that Biden was a flawless president or candidate. And incumbent presidents should have less sway with the parties that decide to renominate them; we would all be better off if parties were more robust in this regard. Thinking about this from a party perspective also opens up interesting, if unanswerable, questions about how Bernie Sanders might have fared as the nominee or the president - he’s even older than Biden, but popular with younger voters.
Nevertheless, the discrepancy in how the news media has approached the aging of each (now) octogenarian president is notable. And these differences aren’t just about the individuals in question, but about differences in how their respective parties operate, and in how they are positioned with regard to power and media. We should expect, as corporate-owned news media become cozier with Trump and more drawn to the power consolidation he represents, that these discrepancies will continue to grow.