Age is a sensitive matter in American politics. Neither President Joe Biden, at 80, nor his predecessor and re-election candidate, Donald Trump, who will turn 77 in June, want to talk or hear about the matter. But Republican Nikki Haley, 51, took advantage of her presentation as a 2024 presidential candidate not to comment on the matter but to delve into her wound. The former ambassador to the UN and former governor of South Carolina opted for all US politicians over the age of 75 to submit to mandatory "mental capacity tests." And if what she was looking for with that proposal was to create controversy and noise, she got it.
The first rival that appears to Trump with a view to the 2024 primaries launched his challenge against older politicians while betting on "leaving behind the obsolete ideas and faded names of the past and that a new generation guide us towards the future". Because "it's not that the US is past its prime, but our politicians are past theirs," he said at the official announcement of his candidacy on Wednesday in Charleston, the capital of South Carolina. “We will not win the fight for the 21st century if we continue to trust the politicians of the 20th century,” he added.
The White House came out in a rush, with signs of pique. "We've heard these kinds of attacks or comments" from Republicans. "And the president beat them at their own game," said the president's spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, before reviewing the times Republicans challenged Biden and he defeated them, at the polls or with far-reaching laws.
Trump responded to his competitor with a barrage of accusations and ironies through mass messages from his team. In one of her e-mails, the former president's collaborators linked her to Hillary Clinton because years ago she said that she had "inspired" her; in another, released minutes after the electoral act and entitled The real Nikki Haley, she was criticized for having supported cuts in public health; in a third, Trump sarcastically wished her luck: "She's polled at 1%, not a bad start!"
The challenge from the ultra-conservative but not entirely predictable Nikki Haley provoked a spectacular fight in the opposite camp when the CNN presenter and undisguised anti-republican Don Lemon, in his eagerness to discredit the candidate, said: "She herself is not in her best time, sorry A woman is considered to be in her 20s, 30s or maybe 40s,” he blurted out. And to support his statement, he pointed out that this is what you read “if you search on Google”.
One of Lemon's two morning show partners, Poppy Harlow, indignantly asked her what she meant by "the best time for women," the best years to have children or to serve as president.
Haley responded to the anchor on Twitter: “To be clear, I am NOT asking for proof of competency for sexist middle-aged CNN anchors; only for the people who make our laws and are over 75 years old,” she wrote. Later, in another entry, she added that "liberals are always the most sexist." The subject became one of the most powerful on the net, with innumerable attacks on the journalist. Haley retweeted some of the most prominent ones, making the controversy the number one issue of his fledgling campaign. Don Lemon ended up apologizing.
The press immediately became involved in the controversy. The New York Times went into the substance of Haley's proposal within its information on the annual medical examination that Biden underwent on Thursday, with satisfactory results: the examination, the newspaper stressed, did not include useful mental training tests that they can be done “in minutes”. And he cited a specialist, the chief of cognitive neurology at NYU Langone Medical Center, Thomas Wisniewski, for whom "everyone in their 80s should undergo minimal mental screening tests as part of a general evaluation"; and "not because a doctor suspects that something is wrong with a patient, but because the incidence of dementia in 80-year-old patients is considerable, around 30%."
The Washington Post highlighted an opinion column by Julianna Goldman with an eloquent title. "Biden is older, but age is not what she used to be."
If Trump maintains his candidacy and Biden confirms it, it is certain that age will weigh on the campaign. In fact, he already weighs.
