Cover-Up in Plain Sight

In June 2023, more than seven months before the first Democratic primary of the presidential election, the Daily Mail asked a thousand voters for a word to describe each of the announced candidates. In a resulting word cloud, the choice that completely dominated for Joe Biden was “old.” (For Donald Trump, by the way, the word was “criminal.”) This was not a fluke: ten weeks later, in August, a poll for the Associated Press found that 77 percent of adults and 69 percent of Democrats thought Biden was “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” (A slight majority, 51 percent—but only 28 percent of Republicans—said the same of Trump.) A Wall Street Journal survey the next week also found that more than 70 percent of adults considered Biden “too old to run for president.” (Fewer than half said the same of Trump.)