Late-night host Bill Maher offered advice for dealing with President Joe Biden’s age, encouraging the 81-year-old to “lean in” to his advanced years—“lean in like you’re eating soup.”
On Friday’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, the comedian touched on one of the more hot-button issues of the 2024 campaign cycle, calling the president an “old fart” and telling him to “own it.”
“Instead of trying to refute all the too-old-to-be-president slams, Joe must embrace them,” he said. “Just admit it say yes, I’m bad with names and I walk like a toddler with a full diaper.”
“Yes we’re all worried Joe is not as quick as he used to be, but when did we start insisting that our presidents be smart?” he added, before pulling up a photo of Donald Trump and George W. Bush and quipping: “Like these assholes?”
He further encouraged the president to let his “old fart flag fly” at the upcoming State of the Union, and cut to a skit in which he pantomimed Biden giving the address from a walker labeled “Walker One.”
“You don’t want a young person in charge of our defense,” he said, pretending to be Biden. “We need a president who can stand up to Russia and say to its current president, Mr. Gorbachev, get off my lawn.”
Biden’s advanced age is a persistent stumbling point for his campaign, which recently joined TikTok as a way to reach young voters. (Of the social media platform, Maher advised: “Get off that shit right now.”)
A New York Times/Sienna poll from last fall found 70 percent of voters say Biden is too old to be president; a Reuters poll from around the same time found 65 percent of Democrats feel similarly.
The issue came to a head last month, when a special counsel report on his handling of classified documents surfaced, describing Biden’s memory as “hazy,”and “poor” and noting he could not recall the years he served as vice president. (“My memory is fine,” the president said during a press conference in response.)
The White House physician said after Biden’s annual physical this week that he was a “healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male" who “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.”
Maher, however, suggested that leaning into concerns about his age might make the president more relatable to some of his core demographic. “Take all your ads off Twitter and put them on CBS,” he said. “Tell America I feel your joint pain.”
“Be yourself,” he added. “And Joe, yourself is old.”
