Media spend many times as much space on discussing Biden’s age relative to Trump’s

If Donald Trump is re-elected, he will be the oldest president in American history. He will spend the majority of his term in his 80s. He is regularly giving speeches in which he sounds flat-out demented — I mean quite a bit more than “normal” in his case. So we get this:

My impression was that this was getting better, after months of mockery from media critics, but apparently the data don’t really support that very strongly if at all.

The media’s explanation for this is that the public seems much more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s. Why this might be the case will remain an eternal mystery.

I do think an LGM commenter — can’t remember who exactly, maybe Lori — made a legitimate point a day or two ago when they pointed out that Biden seems frail in a way that Trump doesn’t. This of course has nothing to do with mental acuity per se, but it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t play well on TV, and unfortunately we like to watch.

. . . annakarenina (every LGM commenter is unhappy in her own way) really nails this I think:

It’s not going to get better. Trump is such a horrible candidate, so obviously unfit, and so blatantly corrupt, that there was no way to write serious horse-race copy unless they came up with a “fault” for Biden to have. Thus the narrative became that Biden is old, and because this fault is unfixable, it allows them to pretend that this election presents a serious choice and requires lots of news coverage to help people make this choice.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.