Trump is too old to change his mind about anything

Like the Soviet Union in its final days, the United States has become a gerontocracy.

- ERIC LEWIS

Joe Biden shuffled out of the White House at age 82. Donald Trump turns 80 in June, no doubt to be marked with great pomp and circumstance. He will be 82 when he is scheduled to leave office. Ronald Reagan was 75 and failing when Iran-Contra broke in 1986, apparently in the early stages of dementia.

All presidents, young and old, make foreign policy mistakes. But older ones not only often lose a step or more in their analytic faculties, but also often make decisions based upon political worldviews that were formed decades before, and then try to apply these fixed ideas to a very different world. Social science research suggests that political worldviews are formed relatively early in life, with ages 14 to 24 being the critical years.

By the time leaders reach middle age, the impact of events on the worldviews of leaders is relatively small. Presidents governing in their late seventies or early eighties, even those who (unlike Trump) had been attentive to and immersed in the political currents of their formative years, are making decisions that are likely to have been irrelevant to what has been required for decades.

Joe Biden assumed his Senate seat when he turned 30 in 1973. He was 65 and had spent 36 years in the Senate when he became Barack Obama's vice-president, and 77 when he became president. To be sure, his views evolved over the years on a number of important domestic issues, including notably on abortion rights and mass incarceration.