Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised national prosperity and global peace, saying he would quickly drive down the cost of groceries in local supermarkets and bring deadly overseas wars to an abrupt end.

He echoed that rosy message during a wide-ranging news conference Monday, saying his second term “will be the most exciting and successful period of reform and renewal in all of American history, maybe of global history.”

“The Golden Age of America, I call it,” he said. “It’s begun.”

Then again, maybe not. Trump also offered a caveat — a warning that things could go badly wrong, such as when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted “out of nowhere” during his first term in office.

“We hope we don’t have any intervening problems,” he said, “because things happen.”

The remarks were the latest example of Trump’s idea of himself as the strongman fixer of all the world’s problems running headlong into his penchant for pessimism — for casting the world as a dangerous place, the nation as a crumbling wreck and himself as the undeserving victim of political ill will and plain bad luck.

Since his victory last month, those dueling worldviews have collided repeatedly, as he has softened the assured rhetoric of his stump speeches, walked back some of his more grandiose campaign promises and doubled down on some of his more dire warnings about a future filled with chaos.

In his victory speech, Trump said he would “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises. Nothing will stop me from keeping my word to you, the people.”

During a more recent interview with Time magazine, Trump cast fresh doubt on his ability to bring down grocery prices — a key campaign promise — by saying, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” After a campaign that spent millions on ads about the alleged threat posed by the nation’s small population of transgender people, he also suggested the issue has been overblown, saying “it gets massive coverage, and it’s not a lot of people.”

During his Monday news conference, Trump said he’d recently had a “very good conversation” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is leading a brutal campaign against Hamas in Gaza and beyond, and that he believes “the Middle East will be in a good place” soon.

However, he also said that if hostages taken from Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that precipitated the war aren’t returned by his inauguration on Jan. 20, “all hell’s going to break out.”

Asked to clarify, he simply said: “It won’t be pleasant.”

Trump also said that Russia’s war on Ukraine — which he promised to end in a day during the campaign, saying “I’ll have that done in 24 hours” — will be “actually more difficult” than addressing the Middle East tensions.

He said the fighting was producing the “worst carnage this world has seen” since World War II, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must be “prepared to make a deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end it.

Asked directly if he thinks Ukraine should “cede territory” to Russia in that deal, he said he would let people know once he takes office and begins having meetings as president. Then he suggested the territory isn’t worth fighting over.

“There are cities that there’s not a building standing. It’s a demolition site. There is not a building standing,” he said. “So people can’t go back to those cities. There’s nothing there. It’s just rubble.”

According to historians and experts in political speech, Trump’s wildly vacillating rhetoric is unique among presidents — many of whom have overpromised or shifted positions, but few so wildly.

“The president-elect has spoken on both sides of so many issues that it’s impossible to know what he will do after being inaugurated. It’s a brilliant strategy, leaving him free to move in any direction,” said H.W. Brands, a prominent historian, author and history professor at University of Texas at Austin. “His predecessors, wherever they are, must be watching in envy.”

Brands noted that Trump has less of a mandate than he claims, having won but not by much and failing to secure a popular majority. His “margin of error is slim,” Brands said.

But as long as his “appeal to his base remains firm,” Brands said, “he will continue to be largely immune from ordinary expectations of political leaders.”

One limit, Brands said, is that “the longer he is in government himself, the less persuasive his efforts to blame government for what his base doesn’t like.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of “Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words,” which considers how presidents have defined the office through their speech, said Trump “lives in an all-or-nothing world,” and it is reflected in his stark pronouncements about the direction of the country and the world.

“Trump on average is far more hyperbolic than candidates have traditionally been,” she said.

Presidents and presidential candidates of all stripes “routinely claim that they will do something that they actually can’t do alone, that requires Congress,” Jamieson said — such as Vice President Kamala Harris promising to sign a bill that would restore the protections of Roe vs. Wade.

“That’s a routine part of presidential discourse, that’s not unusual,” Jamieson said.

But Trump does something different, she said, in that he promises to accomplish things that are “completely unrealistic,” then works to “reframe” the promise in the eyes of his followers once he fails to fulfill it.

His first-term promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall, for example, morphed into a promise Mexico would pay for a piece of the wall, then transformed into an argument that Mexico had in fact paid for the wall by agreeing separately to deploy troops to the border.

Trump is able to get away with such shifts for a few reasons, Jamieson said. One is that he has made good on other big promises, like overturning Roe vs. Wade. Another is that his followers understand and accept his speech as bluster — “not as literal statements” but as “statements that he is going to do something that is bigger and more impactful than what other people are going to do,” Jamieson said.

That Trump has already started walking back promises about the economy is new, she said, adding that she will be interested to see how he handles the other economic promises he has made about decreasing or eliminating taxes — including the federal income tax, tax on tips and tax on Social Security benefits — and increasing tariffs without costs being passed on to consumers.

“Unless mainstream economists are wrong,” Jamieson said, “that’s impossible.”

One of the first major opportunities for Trump to describe his view of the world heading into his second term will be his inauguration.

Presidents have traditionally offered a hopeful view of the country at inaugurations, but not Trump. He shocked many political observers during his first inaugural speech in 2017, when he spoke of “American carnage” and a suffering nation.

During a recent interview with NBC, he said “carnage” would not be his message this time around, but “unity.”

Some experts, including Jamieson, were doubtful, as unity messages have not come easily to Trump before.

“It’s as if he only has one mode, it’s campaign mode, and he only has one focus, it’s himself,” Jamieson said.

Unity speeches are generally “centered on something other than yourself,” she said, “and he seems to have trouble with it.”

WASHINGTON — 

Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, broke a long silence and denounced his former boss as a man who fits “the general definition of fascist.”

The conservative, normally taciturn Kelly was moved to speak out after Trump condemned former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Adam B. Schiff and other Democrats as “the enemy from within” and said he would deploy troops onto the nation’s streets to suppress opposition.

“Using the military on, to go after, American citizens is … a very, very bad thing,” Kelly told the New York Times. “Even to say it for political purposes to get elected, I think it’s a very, very bad thing.”

Kelly wasn’t the only former Trump aide to warn that the GOP candidate shouldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. Dozens of people who worked in senior positions in the Trump administration have chimed in. Gen. Mark A. Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called him “fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to the country.” Former national security advisor John Bolton said he was “unfit to be president.”

Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, any time he wanted,” Kelly said.

Did those warnings from authoritative sources — eminent figures Trump once appointed to high-ranking jobs — have any effect on his voters as election day approaches?

Not as far as anyone can tell.

Readers of this column won’t be surprised to learn that I agree wholeheartedly with Kelly, Milley, Bolton and their colleagues: Trump is a danger to our democracy.

He neither understands nor respects the Constitution. He yearns openly to rule the way China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin do, as an autocrat answerable to no one. “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist,” he said admiringly of Xi.

Trump revels in divisiveness and cruelty. And his economic “program,” which boils down to massive tariffs on imports plus unlimited drilling for oil and gas, would be disastrous.

Why do millions of voters — many of them, as Trump might put it, very fine people — blow past the warnings of figures like Kelly, Milley and Bolton?

Over the last year, I’ve listened to dozens of Trump voters describe their reasons for sticking with him.

Some, his hardcore base, agree with everything the former president says right down to the coarsest insults.

Others admit to qualms about Trump’s style but say they support him because they hope he can bring back the low-inflation prosperity of his first two years in office.

But a third group, which includes many independents as well as moderate Republicans, is the most perplexing. Not only do they dislike Trump’s style, they worry about some of his positions: his desire to unravel Obamacare, his threats to deploy the military against domestic opponents, his indiscriminate tariffs, his plan to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists.

But many say they don’t think Trump would — or could — actually make those things happen.

In a focus group last week organized for NBC News by the public opinion consulting firm Engagious, for example, an Atlanta home inspector named Kevin said he worried that Trump’s tariffs would make consumer prices go up.

“It’s a bad idea,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to really go anywhere. I think it’ll cost too much money. It’ll be too difficult politically.” He’ll probably vote for Trump anyway, he said.

Pollsters have called this Trump’s “believability gap.” Voters hear what he says, but they discount it — they think that “he’s just talking” or that surely somebody will stop his more outlandish ideas.

But there are two problems with those Trump voters’ self-comforting rationalizations.

The first is that Trump already has a track record of trying to do most of those things. He tried to repeal Obamacare, but a handful of moderate Republican senators got in his way. He issued an executive order that would have enabled him to replace civil servants with political appointees, but time ran out on his term before he could use it.

And when demonstrators assembled across the street from the White House, he urged military officials to deploy troops and shoot protesters in the legs — but Gen. Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper stopped him.

“When he starts talking about using the military against people … I think we should take that very seriously,” Olivia Troye, who served as an aide to Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, told my colleague Noah Bierman recently. “He actually talked about shooting Americans. I was there … I witnessed that.”

The second problem with the “believability gap” is that if Trump gets back to the White House, he will be more likely to get his way.

He has frequently complained that he made a mistake in his first term by appointing aides like Kelly, Milley and Bolton, who believed it was their duty to restrain the president’s ill-considered impulses. If he gets a second term, he’ll surround himself with more people who will do his bidding without raising pesky questions.

He’ll run into less opposition from other institutions too.

Republicans in Congress, who occasionally restrained Trump when he was president, have purged most of the moderates from their ranks. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is retiring. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, an occasional Trump critic, will no longer be his party’s leader in the Senate.

Federal courts may be more hospitable, too, thanks to judges Trump appointed his first time around.

So moderate Republicans and independents who are tempted to vote for Trump because they hope he will lower taxes or improve the economy should think long and hard about the risks of that bargain.

When Trump says he’ll order prosecutors to go after Joe Biden and “the Pelosis,” he means it. When Trump says he’ll punish businesses like Amazon if he doesn’t like their owners’ views, he means it. When Trump says he believes the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” he means it.

And this time, he would know better how to turn his wishes into reality. A second Trump term wouldn’t be a benign rerun of the first version. As his former aides are trying their best to warn us, it would be far worse.

WASHINGTON — 

Former President Trump hasn’t officially won the Republican presidential nomination yet. But he’s already throwing his weight around on foreign policy — and Republicans in Congress are falling in line.

At a campaign rally this month in South Carolina, Trump said he would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies that don’t spend enough on defense.

“No, I would not protect you,” the former president said he told European leaders. “In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”

It was an extraordinary statement for a presidential candidate, and it drew rebukes from President Biden, who called it “shameful” and “un-American,” and European leaders. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said any suggestion that the United States would not defend allies was “dangerous” and “only in Russia’s interests.”

But most Republicans in Congress excused it as just another example of Trump being Trump.

“I have zero concern,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said. “He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician, and we’ve already been through this. You would think people would have figured it out by now.”

That wasn’t Trump’s only foreign policy intervention this month. He also lobbied GOP senators to block a bill containing $60 billion in aid to Ukraine and said any future aid should be limited to loans instead of grants.

Most Republicans rolled over for that one too. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, once a fierce supporter of Ukraine, said Trump’s opposition persuaded him to switch sides.

Trump’s positions weren’t entirely new, except for the innovation of encouraging Russia to attack U.S. allies. During his four years as president, he frequently charged that Germany and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization owed the United States billions of dollars for backstopping their defense, as if they owed nonexistent “unpaid dues” or the alliance were a protection racket. He eventually focused on the more reasonable complaint that some NATO members weren’t living up to the alliance’s defense spending targets — but he still told aides that he wanted to pull the United States out of NATO completely.

He repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin — and still does; earlier this month, he lauded the Russian president as “very smart, very sharp.” As of Sunday, Trump was silent about the death in an Arctic prison colony of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, except for a cryptic social media post suggesting that he has been persecuted by Biden just as Navalny was persecuted by Putin. And he has frequently expressed hostility toward Ukraine.

Here’s what’s different this time: In Trump’s first term, Republicans in Congress and his own foreign policy aides talked him out of acting on most of those impulses. If he wins a second term, those restraining forces will be mostly gone.

The former president has said he intends to fill a second Trump administration with MAGA loyalists instead of the establishment figures like Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who populated his first term.

“When I went there [to the White House], I didn’t know a lot of people; I had to rely on, in some cases, RINOs,” Trump said last year, referring to “Republicans in Name Only.” “But I know them all now. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones.”

Congress will be different too. Since Trump was elected in 2016, dozens of establishment Republicans in the House and Senate have retired or lost their seats to pro-Trump candidates. Others will leave at the end of their current terms.

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, a frequent Trump critic, is giving up his seat at the end of the year. Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whom Trump has derided, says he plans to stay in the Senate, but he is likely to face a challenge for his leadership post.

Others, like Graham and Rubio, both of whom once criticized Trump, have trimmed their sails to avoid clashing with him. Last year, Rubio co-authored a law that prohibits a president from pulling the United States out of NATO without approval from Congress — but that won’t prevent Trump from undercutting the alliance by saying he won’t defend its members.

The cumulative result has been Trump unleashed, and a sea change in Republican foreign policy. For 60 years, from 1952 to 2012, the GOP was led by largely hawkish internationalists, from Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and Romney.

Trump’s foreign policy instincts represent a different strain — xenophobic, suspicious of alliances, unilateralist on some issues and isolationist on others — that has taken root among Republican voters.

Last year, a survey sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs reported that most Republicans want the United States to “stay out of world affairs” instead of being actively involved. That was a striking reversal from earlier decades. As recently as 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, 70% of Republicans said they favored an assertive U.S. foreign policy. By last year, that number had fallen to 47%.

In the same poll, only 40% of Republicans favored military aid for Ukraine, compared with 76% of Democrats. Unsurprisingly, opposition was strongest among the voters most attached to Trump.

Old-school internationalists in both parties warn that the consequences of a second, less-restrained Trump term would be dire.

“If Trump is reelected, adversaries will be emboldened, and allies will be frightened,” said Kori Schake of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who worked in the George W. Bush administration. “Allies are likely to make compromises with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea because they won’t trust us.”

“We spend hundreds of billions of dollars [on defense] to establish the credibility of our extended deterrence,” said Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former dean of Harvard Kennedy School who worked in the Clinton administration. “Trump creates doubts … that undercut those investments.”

Or take it from someone who worked at Trump’s side during the first term: his erstwhile national security advisor John Bolton.

“The damage he did in his first term was reparable,” Bolton said recently. “The damage in the second term would be irreparable.”

After Biden won the 2020 election, he tried to assure U.S. allies that the four-year Trump era was a temporary anomaly.

“America is back,” Biden proclaimed.

If Trump wins a second term, the message will be: No, it’s not.

WASHINGTON — 

My New Year’s resolution 12 months ago was to write fewer columns about Donald Trump. That well-intended goal met the same end as most New Year’s resolutions; I soon fell off the wagon and wrote more columns about Trump in 2023 than I had the prior year.

Like it or not, the former president is the dominant political figure of our time.

He has remade the Republican Party in his image and is almost certain to win its presidential nomination even if he’s convicted in any of the four criminal prosecutions he’s fighting.

He stands an even chance of winning a second term in the White House, a victory that would allow him to put his stamp on American government until 2029.

And he’s promising big things. He says that if he’s elected, he’ll prosecute his opponents (“I say, go down and indict them”), send the National Guard into crime-ridden cities such as Chicago (“worse than Afghanistan”), and bar U.S. entry to people “who don’t like our religion.”

In his first term, Trump battered the guardrails of our political system but didn’t succeed in destroying them. If he wins a second term, he’ll likely be more effective, free of restraining influences in his Cabinet and surrounded by true believers who yearn to turn his promises into law.

This year-end column is my annual exercise in humility — a report on what I got wrong this year and what I got right.

That’s why it begins with a confession: I was wrong when I thought Trump’s legal troubles — and other Republicans — would get in the way of his march to the GOP nomination.

I was wrong when I talked up the prospects of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom I described as the most potent challenger to Trump and “the rising star of the conservative firmament.”

“To many GOP donors and voters, he [looks] like a potential fusion candidate — militant enough to appeal to Trump fans, but conventional enough for Republicans tired of the former president’s chaotic style,” I wrote. As Republican pollster Whit Ayres said: “He’s Trump without the craziness.”

But once voters got a look at DeSantis, he turned out to just be a less charismatic version of Trump.

Still, I persisted in the forlorn hope that the GOP race might turn into a free-for-all.

“This race may be more open than it looks,” I ventured in April.

Wrong again!

Readers often wonder whether reporters are biased. We are in at least one respect: In election years, we root for drama, not orderly coronations.

I stumbled when I wrote about President Biden, too.

In July, I wrote that Biden was betting that the economy would soon turn up and that voters would give him credit. The president and I were both premature about the economy’s upturn — and so far, we’re wrong about the voters.

I did get a few things right. In May, I predicted that a Biden-Trump rematch would “mostly be about which candidate you dislike more,” and that the state of the economy would likely determine the outcome. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out.

The journalism lesson here is an old one: Punditry is often unreliable, especially in primary campaigns.

The glorious thing about primaries is how unpredictable they can be. Well-bankrolled favorites often crumble once the campaign begins. Just ask former GOP hopefuls Phil Gramm (1996), Rudolph W. Giuliani (2008) and Jeb Bush (2016).

There’s also a more important lesson we should carry into 2024.

As Jay Rosen, a journalism scholar at New York University, has been saying, the most important question in this campaign is “not the odds, but the stakes” — “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring the horse race; readers still want to know who’s ahead and why. It means putting the substantive questions first: What would these candidates do in the White House?

A contest between Biden and Trump isn’t a conventional race between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican. It’s a choice between an 81-year-old institutionalist and a 77-year-old norm-breaker who says he’d like to suspend the Constitution and rule as an autocrat.

Making the stakes clear requires taking Trump’s hair-raising promises seriously. It also requires pressing Biden on what he would do in a second term — a question he has largely ducked, content to run simply as the anti-Trump.

So there’s my resolution for 2024: to make sure every reader has the clearest view possible of the choice this fall — not only the odds, but the stakes.

And yes, that will mean reading more Trump stories written by me — even more than in 2023.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — 

For those who doubt Joe Biden’s capacity to be president, Herb Klar has a suggestion: Swing by his neighborhood sometime.

“They don’t come to Rossmoor and see all the octagenarians … and see how lively and bright and competent we all are,” said Klar, 76, a retired clinical social worker, who was sporting a Golden State Warriors hoodie on a crisp afternoon on the east side of San Francisco Bay.

Old age, he said, “is seen as a kind of freakishness.”

Biden is the oldest president in American history, making every day in office a milestone of sorts. He is attempting something never before tried: Winning reelection to a second term that would end when he is 86 years old.

The prospect horrifies Republicans. It also creates no small amount of stomach churn for Biden’s fellow Democrats.

“So many people as they get into their 80s start to lose some of their cognitive ability,” said Lee Herschman, who happens to be 86 and spent her career in the entertainment and recording industries. “That’s just what happens.”

But Herschman and others among Biden’s generational peers — people who understand better than most the challenges of aging — say they see no signs whatsoever the president is hobbled or unfit for office.

“He knows the facts. He knows the players. He has all the data,” said Katha Hartley, 83, who still works as a business consultant. “And if you compare that to the person who may be running against him, who might also be in prison later, there’s not even a comparison.”

Hartley and 14 others ranging in age from 68 to 92 gathered recently at a clubhouse in their woodsy 55-and-older community to discuss Biden, politics and what it’s like to watch folks advancing in their years.

All belong to the Democrats of Rossmoor, which claims 1,000 members, making it the country’s largest Democratic club. Not surprisingly, each of them supports the president’s reelection. (“A no-brainer,” one called out.)

But Biden was not their unanimous pick for the party’s 2020 nomination. Some preferred Elizabeth Warren, others Amy Klobuchar, Michael R. Bloomberg or Bernie Sanders before Biden emerged from the crowded field.

And not all of them agreed with Biden’s decision to seek a second term.

Ten of the 15 said they would have preferred he stand aside in 2024 in favor of someone else; Gavin Newsom, Klobuchar, Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and J.B. Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer — the governors of Illinois and Michigan, respectively — were all mentioned.

It’s not anything that Biden has done, or failed to do. Some hailed him as the most successful and consequential president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, citing, among other achievements, passage of a massive infrastructure bill and efforts to boost tech and rebuild the country’s manufacturing base.

“He’s been politically brilliant in terms of domestic issues,” said Rose Holmes, 71, who worked as a physical therapist. “I think he’s been brilliant on the international stage in terms of how he was able to pull NATO back together” and rally nations to support Ukraine.

It’s not even so much doubts about Biden’s cognition or physical stamina. Rather, it’s worry over how others perceive Biden.

In short, his electability.

Steve Lazar is convinced the president’s mind “is solid as a rock.” But the 85-year-old — who had two careers, one as a popcorn distributor, the second as a commercial real estate broker — said that doesn’t always come across.

“Being nimble and being able to project his strength at that age is not going to be easy,” Lazar said.

“This is a media-driven age,” Jack Padley, 79, a retired state worker, put in. “And he’s no Jack Kennedy when it comes to delivering a message.”

About half — seven of the 15 — had concerns over whether Biden would even survive a second term.

“He’s old,” said Mary Taylor, a corporate consultant on diversity and equity issues who, at 68, was the youngster of the group. “Like we all are. Realistically, yes, something could happen.”

“Any of us could fall over at any minute,” another voice chimed in, drawing murmured assent.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who would step in if something happened to Biden, drew a mix of sympathy and consternation.

Not about her ability to take over as president, but rather how — as a Black woman and Asian American — she would be treated if she did.

Would congressional Republicans “push back on her just to prove that she’s not capable?” Hartley wondered. “I think there would be a bias against her from the beginning and it’s just maddening to me.”

“It has nothing to do with her competency,” said Cassie Tzur, 80, a retired social worker. “I think she’s sharp.”

But, she went on, “Despite our feminist efforts in the ‘70s and ‘80s and earlier, we still live in a racist and sexist society and I think she would be creamed. Look what they did to Obama and his wife. I mean, it was terrible how she was treated and I’m afraid the same thing could happen.”

There was no shortage of advice from around the rectangular table, most dealing with how Biden could come across without seeming, well, so old.

Raise and project your voice, he was instructed, so it doesn’t sound so papery. Chuck the cue cards and speak more from the heart, which Biden is obviously more comfortable doing.

Quit jogging to the podium, which, it was agreed, only makes him appear awkward and stiff.

“I know the message they’re trying to give you, but I don’t think he’s such a good messenger,” said Joyce Brock, who used to own two Los Angeles-area clothing stores, in the Valley and near LAX. At 92, she was the senior member of the group.

“They should have someone else like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger saying, ‘He’s in great shape.’ Have someone else talk about it instead of him,” Brock suggested. “He doesn’t look good.”

Appearance aside, it was agreed that age is nothing Biden should be ashamed of. It can actually be a virtue.

It’s not as though he is just entering politics at age 81. “He has a wealth of knowledge that he brings with him,” said Taylor, as heads nodded around the table.

Now Biden just has to convince the rest of the country.