Given our rapid demographic shifts, I suppose it was inevitable that the problems of an aging society would be embodied in a presidential election eventually. Now they have.

First, we witnessed a president’s dramatic decline in a prime-time presidential debate. And now, Donald Trump might be poised to succeed that man as America’s oldest president ever.

After what happened with President Joe Biden, it’s no surprise that folks on the left have been speculating about Trump’s mental acuity every time he does something weird. Following Monday’s town hall in Pennsylvania, I wondered whether they didn’t have a point. After two attendees required medical attention, the former president jokingly asked whether anyone else wanted to faint, then abruptly stopped taking questions and converted the event into a literal listening session, asking for music to be played in lieu of the planned question-and-answer forum.

I won’t try to diagnose Trump’s mental state from afar (and for what it’s worth, at Wednesday’s town hall in Georgia, he seemed no more unhinged than usual). But regardless of whether Trump suffers from age-related cognitive decline now, there’s a high risk that sometime in the next four years, he will. Which is why we need a constitutional amendment to prevent someone so old from ever running for president again.

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