President Biden has been warned by top aides and his wife Jill to rest more and be more mindful of his health going into 2024 — while he claims he “feels so much younger” than his 81 years, according to a new report.
The age dynamic has caused tension inside the White House, according to Axios, which reported that aides have been known to roll their eyes at Biden’s insistence that he feels spry.
“He is his own worst enemy when it comes to his schedule,” one ex-Biden adviser told the outlet, which reported in April that aides have trouble booking presidential events at certain times of the day — with the result that Biden’s agenda is dominated by happenings between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Both Republican and Democratic voters have expressed concern in surveys this year that Biden, who would be 86 years old at the end of a prospective second term, lacks the mental fitness to perform the job.
“Rest more?” reacted Spectator USA contributing editor Stephen L. Miller on X to the report. “He makes barely two public appearances a week, doesn’t take questions or hold press conferences. He has to wear special shoes and take the baby steps on [Air Force One] and is in Delaware 4 days a week, and they are telling him to rest more.”
“He can’t do the job,” Miller added.
“I’m shocked Biden’s aides think he is doing too much right now and needs to ‘rest more,'” agreed policy analyst Anthony LaMesa. “He’s already skipping summits and trips; rarely interacting with citizens and the press. Biden can’t give 100% to the presidency, let alone his campaign. Time for him to step aside.”
Biden — who has served in Washington for half a century — has tried to let the American public know he is aware of their concerns about him remaining in the Oval Office, often by joking about his advanced age.
During a turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House Nov. 20, the president quipped that it was “difficult turning 60,” before sharing a widely mocked birthday photo of a cake full of burning candles.
“Turns out on your 146th birthday, you run out of space for candles!” the post on the president’s Instagram account read.
Earlier this year, Biden told a reporter when asked about his age: “I can’t even say the number. It doesn’t — it doesn’t register with me.”
The clumsy commander-in-chief has also stumbled several times bounding up the steps of the presidential aircraft, and his team has employed a physical therapist to help improve his balance and avoid a potentially disastrous fall.
In June, Biden hit the deck at the Air Force Academy’s commencement ceremony after delivering a speech to the graduating cadets — drawing stunned gasps from the crowd.
That has led some Biden allies to wish he would be more frank and explicit about the topic.
“His age is clearly something voters are worried about, fairly or not,” one former White House official told Axios, “and yelling, ‘Nuh-uh’ isn’t cutting it.”
Former President Ronald Reagan was the oldest US president until former President Donald Trump won the office at age 70 — but Biden beat that record by defeating Trump at the age of 77 in 2020.
Longtime Biden watchers have attempted to play down concerns about his abilities.
“This is something that Biden’s been doing for his whole life — he always wants to do more,” Ted Kaufman, Biden’s former chief of staff and briefly his successor as a senator from Delaware, told Axios.
Jill Biden previously expressed fears to then-vice presidential chief of staff Steve Ricchetti at the end of her husband’s time in the Obama White House that Joe was “exhausted,” “not sleeping” and the nonstop work was “going to kill him.”
The entreaties from the then-second lady and Ricchetti prompted Biden “to ease off for a while,” the president noted in his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad.”
“Jill didn’t want him to do as much as he wanted to do. And he didn’t want her to do as much as she wanted to do,” Kaufman recalled.
“Since he first ran for Senate, President Biden has always been a hard worker who is eager to do more than any schedule could accommodate,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Axios in a statement.
“Like when he became the first president to visit two war zones not controlled by the US military, late-night discussions with members of Congress as he passed the most groundbreaking legislative agenda in modern history, or this past week as he continued to work around the clock on critical national security priorities long after House Republicans stopped trying to keep up and left Washington on vacation.”