Donald Trump turned 80 on Sunday. When Joe Biden was president, 80 was too old for the job (even if people who mocked Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and John McCain for being over 70 tried to tell you otherwise). As I observed then: “Britain, by contrast, has had three prime ministers serve past age 80, all of them long-tenured giants of the office: Lord Palmerston died in office at 84 in 1865, William Gladstone served until he was 84 in 1894, and Winston Churchill stepped down at 80 in 1955, after struggling through his final two years in office following a debilitating stroke. All three men gradually lost their grip on international events in their final years.” A grimmer contrast still, especially considering how Biden was pushed around by younger radicals in his party, could be found in two military giants of the First World War, Paul von Hindenburg (who at 86 and failing in 1933 signed away the German government to Hitler) and Philippe Pétain (who at 84 in 1940 surrendered to Hitler and established the Vichy regime). Maybe those men always had those flaws inside them, but their loss of moral courage in the crises of Hitler’s rise was undoubtedly exacerbated by age and infirmity.

In 2026, 80 is still too old. Trump is a different sort of character; many varied people have long since learned that he is easy to influence, but impossible to control. Age has not robbed him of his bluster and swagger in the way that it took Biden’s gift of blarney. But Father Time remains undefeated, and the signs of age are there, if in some cases hard to disentangle from the extent to which Trump’s impulses are less restrained now due to being a second-term president and due to the embittering legal battles of 2020-24. We may yet get through two more years of this without a disaster or crisis that is plainly attributable to Trump’s advanced age. But just because you played three good rounds of Russian roulette doesn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. When Franklin D. Roosevelt left national politics in a pine box, the nation prudently amended the Constitution to prevent presidents-for-life. When Trump follows Biden offstage, we should do the same to prevent octogenarians from holding the most powerful individual job in the world.