Why Americans Yearn for Younger Leaders

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As Donald Trump marks his 80^th birthday, I realize that, barring Trump leaving office before next January 24, I will reach the age of 80 (gasp!) having had only one president who was younger than me. Barack Obama was born a month before I entered my sophomore year in high school and is fourteen years younger than me. Every other person who has been president in my lifetime is older than I am. That’s ridiculous.

For someone to be (approaching) the age of eighty to have had only one president in his lifetime who was younger is a striking illustration of why so many Americans yearn for younger leaders.

I decided to dig a little deeper into this phenomenon by looking into the dates of birth and ages they were when they became president of all the men (sigh) who have been president since the time when Mr. Trump was born. I found some remarkable facts.

Perhaps most stunning to me is that Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all born during a span of nine-and-a-half weeks during the late spring and summer of 1946:

That’s right, in a period of nine-and-a-half weeks in 1946, as the postwar Baby Boom was taking flight, three future presidents — who (if Trump completes his second term) will have held the presidency for 24 years, nearly 10 percent of the history of the United States — were born.

When I checked on the dates of birth of all the presidents during the life of Donald Trump (and me), I found more interesting points.

Here are the data:

The inaugurations of the last three presidencies — Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 — have been of the oldest men ever to take office and the only presidencies to begin with the man in office over 70. Reagan was 69 when he first took office and 73 when he began his second term. We know where his mind had gone before he left office.

The average age of the president during the years since 2016 is 76.5.

There have been only three presidents in the post-World War II era who took office when they were under fifty: JFK (43), Clinton (46), and Obama (47).

There have been four Baby Boomer presidents, three from its first year and one from near its end.

There have at this point been no presidents from the generations since the end of the Boom in 1964, which includes all of Generation X (born1965-1980) and most of Gen Y/Millennials (born 1981-1996) who have reached the Constitutionally prescribed age of 35.

So the desire for younger candidates and leaders is entirely understandable.

That, of course, does not mean that a particular younger candidate would be better than an older one. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in the same age range. Biden’s presidency was an overall success; Trump’s has been an unmitigated disaster. Biden made three major mistakes as president:

• He did not urge Attorney General Merrick Garland to begin investigating Trump’s many crimes early on, which almost certainly would have resulted in Trump today being in prison rather than the White House.

• He allowed a much-too-lax policy on the southern border before finally moving on the problem in his final year in office.

• He decided to run for a second term when he was much too old.

Trump, in stark contrast, has had nothing but failures and has American democracy on the verge of destruction. A listing of what he has done wrong would have to be book length.

And Biden was surrounded by highly competent people. Trump in his second go-round is surrounded by a collection of clowns, fools, money-grubbers, and incompetents who are not permitted to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear.

As someone only seven months younger than Trump, I can testify that age is not deterministic. My mind is at least as sharp as it has ever been. My knees, on the other hand … And I certainly don’t have as much energy as I once did.

We need good, responsible, younger women and men who care about helping others and are not beholden to the hyper-rich and giant corporations to be running and getting elected. That is happening at other levels of government. We desperately need it in the presidency as well.