Trump is now the oldest nominee to ever run for the presidency

Donald Trump is the oldest presidential nominee in United States history now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 election race. But will the former president receive the same sort of criticism about his age as Biden?

April Rubin of Axios reported Biden and Trump were the only two presidents who were over the age of 70 at the beginning of their stints in office. The U.S. has also only seen 12 presidents over the age of 60 in the Oval Office. 

Trump is no spring chicken and it's possible that Biden’s exit from the race could put the focus of the election on Trump’s age regardless of which possible candidate is selected to face off against the former president in November. 

“Concerns over Biden's age and mental fitness were central to calls for his replacement as the Democratic nominee,” Rubin noted, whether or not the same issues will affect the former president now isn’t clear. But he doesn’t like it when his mind is questioned.

Questions about Trump’s perceived cognitive decline had been brought up so much that the former president commented on the situation in June while speaking at a campaign rally and revealed exactly how upset the accusations made him. 

Trump just revealed how annoyed he was about the news media portraying him as cognitively impaired while speaking at a campaign event in Philidelphia in June. 

Trump was at a rally on June 22nd when he took a few minutes to rant about Biden and the way the news media were treating him versus his now-former 2024 presidential rival when it came to how they portrayed each candidate's mental faculties.

The former president talked to the crowd in Pennsylvania about how Biden's backers say all of his recent mishaps caught on camera were fake.  “They say the fake news covered him in a fake manner,” Trump said according to a quote from Mediaite. 

“That’s a lot of fake news back there,” Trump said about the press at the campaign event while the crowd booed the news media. “All we want them to do is be honest, because they’re all going out of business. Nobody believes them anymore,” the former president added. 

Trump then dove into a weird rant that saw him claim the news media had caught Biden in several horrible positions, but instead of calling Biden out on them, they argued in favor of the President and reported that they weren’t compromising. 

“So they get him in about nine different positions… they get him in all these horrible compromising posts and then they say he wasn’t, it really wasn’t that way. It was, so,” Trump explained to the crowd, who were booing as he spoke.

“If I blow it up here, though, they actually… take a perfect, brilliant, beautiful statement that I make. I go for two hours without teleprompters… and if I say one word slightly out, they say, ‘he’s cognitively impaired,’” Trump said with a weird inflection. 

Trump went on to claim that Biden in comparison, could run into walls, fall off of a stage, and even fall upstairs, and the media would along with whatever explanation was given to explain away Biden’s behavior.

The former president called out a particular incident that he claimed the media played off that allegedly saw Biden staring at a tree while he was surrounded by foreign leaders and a paratrooper that dropped from the sky. Trump was likely referencing an incident from the mid-June 2024 G7 summit in Italy. 

“From 20,000 feet of paratroopers landing right in front of him. Everybody, all the foreign leaders there watching, and he turns around to look at a tree. Right? No. And then they say it was fake, he was fine,” Trump said sarcastically.

“And then the press goes along with it. They go along with it. They say, isn’t it terrible, the way they cover him? No, no. He’s terrible. The worst president in history by far,” Trump said.

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“We have to get him out or this country is not going to survive another year," Trump added before moving on to another topic. However, Trump's assertions now seem untrue in the wake of their debate, the public pressure he revealed to drop out of the race, and Biden's decision to ultimately step aside and end his reelection campaign.