There he was again, descending the steps of Air Force One like a man negotiating a peace deal with gravity. One hand welded to the rail, the other dangling, his body listing forward as he lurched for the tarmac below as if it might suddenly fall away. The officials waiting below held their collective breath not out of awe, but out of risk assessment.
President Donald Trump, 79, doesn’t stride off planes anymore. He negotiates with them. And on this latest Asian tour, the person whom we assumed would be at his side, Melania, the world’s most famously disengaged First Lady, was once again conspicuously absent. One begins to wonder if she’s in hiding, or holed up writing a sequel to her memoir. Either way, the man is alone.
And increasingly, it shows.
Let’s drop the pretense: Trump needs a companion. Not a Secret Service agent, not an aide with a golf bag or a nuclear football, a proper, old-fashioned companion. The kind elderly countesses once employed to push them around the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, fetch their shawl and gently spoon them bouillabaisse.
He doesn’t need another campaign manager. He needs an aide to keep him upright and make sure he leaves the stage via the correct exit.
We know the stats: past 60, a fall is the express lane to decline. Gerald Ford never lived down his tumbles both down and up Air Force One; Joe Biden wisely switched to the shorter set of stairs that emerge discreetly from the plane’s belly, like a geriatric fire escape.
Trump, of course, would rather die than take the baby stairs. But perhaps, like many proud men of a certain age, he might consider a chair lift? Or a hydraulic ramp? Qatar’s royal fleet must have one. Picture it: the former president gliding down on a slide, bathed in the glow of Gulf oil money, waving regally. Not a chair lift, a Trumpvator. Very exclusive. The best.
History, cruelly, is not on his side. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, his wife Edith practically ran the government for him. Nancy Reagan shielded her husband through the early fog of Alzheimer’s. Jackie Kennedy famously steadied JFK when he was braced in pain from Addison’s disease. Every president who fought illness had someone beside them. Trump has no one.
His team, meanwhile, behaves as though nothing is amiss, a kind of political elder neglect. But one bad trip on one of these international trips and the show’s over. The ankles are suspiciously swollen, the hands purple with bruises. There’s a visible instability his campaign won’t acknowledge and that, perversely, makes it more visible.
So yes, it’s time. Get him a minder, a handler, a discreet strong arm in a tailored coat. Someone who can whisper, “Careful, sir,” before that trailing right foot misses its mark. Not for sympathy—for optics.
Because one stumble off that staircase, and it won’t just be a meme. It’ll be the metaphor America’s been waiting for.
The post Opinion: It’s Time to Get Trump, 79, a Companion—or a Stairlift appeared first on The Daily Beast.
