Hey folks, today’s newsletter is a two-for-one: I’m hoping to provide a little something both to free and paid subscribers. First, it’s an excuse to post the Substack Election Dialogue video I shot earlier this week with Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring. We got really excellent feedback on this from the real-time audience, and there’s a heavy overlap between the Silver Bulletin and Slow Boring (strongly recommended, of course) audiences, so I thought it was worth sharing. If I’m doing this right, the first 15 minutes or so should be available to everyone, whereas the full video requires a paid subscription.
But don’t worry free subscribers: in the Silver/Yglesias tradition, I’ve also got a hot take for you — or really a lukewarm take, since I partly agree with progressive media critics on this issue.
We probably shouldn’t have an 82-year-old president
Recently, there’s been another push by progressives on the issue of Donald Trump’s age and cognitive fitness. I’m saying “progressives” rather than “Democrats” because, for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment, most of this isn’t coming from the Kamala Harris campaign or other official Democratic Party channels. Much of it centers around a Pennsylvania town-hall-style rally Trump held on Monday during which, after being interrupted twice by medical emergencies in the crowd, Trump cut short the Q&A session to play several songs from his playlist before ultimately exiting the stage to “November Rain.”1
Feel free to judge for yourself, but I was pretty underwhelmed after watching the video of the town hall. It was certainly a weird turn: I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of a Trump fan attending the rally and figure out whether I’d find it disappointing and confusing or the sing-along to be a fun and unexpected diversion. But some of the headlines made it seem as though Trump was just bopping his head aimlessly on stage for 30 minutes. Instead, he was relatively engaged with the crowd throughout, shaking hands and conversing with audience members in the bleachers.2
Philosophically, though, I support the effort to press the media on this story. Trump is 78 and is seeking the presidency until he’s 82. That’s way too old, given the demands of the job. Considering the long history of old presidents seeking to hold onto power when they were clearly diminished — there were many such cases before Trump and Joe Biden — we should probably just have a Constitutional amendment that says a president can’t be older than 75 on Inauguration Day.
The problem, of course, is that if Trump assumes office again, he’ll be essentially the same age as Biden was at the start of his current term. (Trump would be 78 years and 220 days old on Inauguration Day; Biden was 78 years and 61 days old in 2021.) And there’s an extremely high overlap between people who critique the media for not covering Trump’s age enough and those who scolded it for covering Biden’s age too much.
As someone who was an early and frequent critic of Biden’s decision to run for another term, I have no such risk of hypocrisy and so I say: go for it.
But if the media should be covering Trump’s age more, it should probably still be covering Biden’s age more, too. He may not be a candidate for president anymore, but he’s the leader of the free world in a dangerous time facing multiple simultaneous crises from Ukraine to the Middle East. After the June debate, there were numerous accounts even from friendly sources that Biden has limited uptime and is not consistently at his best. Biden is keeping a very light public schedule. How effective is he at handling these or if something even worse happens?
Instead, although there are notable exceptions like this very detailed and well-reported story from the New York Times on Trump’s age earlier this month, media coverage of the age issue fell significantly from the moment that the Democratic nomination was resolved and Kamala Harris replaced Biden. This isn’t a perfect metric because the word “age” may appear out of context (i.e. “Biden is struggling with how to adapt in an age dominated by social media”). But here are the number of NYT articles by month that, respectively, contain both the terms “Biden” and “age” or “Donald Trump” and “age”.3
Mentions of Trump and age closely track those of Biden and age. That’s partly because articles about one candidate’s age or fitness for office will often mention the other one in passing. But basically, we’re back to the pre-debate baseline.
Harris herself has also tread lightly on the issue. She presumably does not want the public to think much about the unpopular Biden, whom she’s struggled to distance herself from, or about what Harris has known about Biden’s mental state as his vice president.
This remains another way in which Biden has done Harris absolutely no favors and why this isn’t an easy campaign for her to win — something Matt and I discussed in the dialog. Voters were never as worried about Trump’s age as they were about Biden’s, and that’s not entirely unreasonable — Biden is three-and-a-half years older and the aging process is quite nonlinear once you get into your late 70s or early 80s. Still, a majority of voters are concerned about Trump’s age. So this is potentially a pretty good issue for Harris that’s been neutered when it wouldn’t have been if Biden had done the responsible thing and stepped aside sooner.
It’s also been part of a tendency for progressive media critics to push for harsher coverage of Trump while simultaneously getting up in arms about reasonable scrutiny of Democrats. In a recent Substack post, for instance, Margaret Sullivan, who was the NYT public editor at the time that I worked there4, critiqued the following two Times headlines:
“In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave” (Oct. 9)
“Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes” (Oct. 9)
I agree that the second headline is poor.5 It’s based on remarks that Trump made to Hugh Hewitt:
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Hewitt, a conservative radio talk show host. “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
The idea that immigrants from certain countries might have a genetic predisposition to commit crimes is, well, pretty racist. I might not agree with every example that progressives give of the press “sanewashing” Trump, but this is a good example of it — a much better example than the one involving the sing-along at Trump’s town hall.
Tough but fair is a persuasive standard
But Harris’s ambiguous and shifting policy positions are a legitimate issue, too, and there’s nothing wrong with the Times’s headline about it. Harris adopted a lot of unpopular left-wing positions as a presidential candidate in 2019; she’s disowned many of them without providing particularly clear expectations as to why. Like Biden’s age and fitness for office, which Sullivan dismissed as a “dangerous obsession”, what voters might expect to get out of a Harris presidency is a basic journalistic question.
This week, Gallup’s annual polling found trust in media falling to even lower record lows. Progressive media critics seem to think that the public just uncritically accepts whatever the media says. But if you read the actual expert literature on this topic — Dan Williams’s Substack is a consistently excellent source on this — something like the opposite is true. Most people are stubborn, perhaps too stubborn, and it takes a lot to change their minds. The public may not scrutinize every detail of every article they read, but credibility and reputation matters. “We’re tough but fair” is a more persuasive position to skeptical readers than Sullivan’s, which often seem to imply that the media should go easy on Harris because Trump is such a threat to democracy.
“Tough but fair” does not imply “both-sidesing”. There are, in my view, considerably more things to scrutinize in Trump’s record than in Harris’s, from January 6 to his conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants, and they are generally of a considerably greater magnitude of concern. The age issue, however, is an example of what happens when media criticism lapses into plain old partisanship. Anyone can see that coverage of Trump’s age naturally invokes the question of Biden’s age, and so the impact of an important issue is blunted.
