Donald Trump is an old man and also a convicted felon. Trump lies about everything!

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham:  

Republicans are trying to ‘cheap fake’ their way back to the White House. The GOP fixation with President Biden’s age seems a way for the 78-year-old Donald Trump to deflect concerns about his own advanced years and failing mental acuity.

Donald Trump doesn’t have campaign rallies. Instead, he hosts liar-paloozas where he spends hours yelling the same falsehoods about the legitimacy of the 2020, presidential election and what he calls the “weaponization” of this nation’s justice system only because he’s finally being held accountable for some of his actions.

But in the way that a dog banging on a piano can accidentally hit a pure chord, Trump occasionally stumbles onto the truth. At a rally in Las Vegas before Trump’s 78th birthday on June 14, his followers sang “Happy Birthday” to the former president, but Trump wasn’t fully appreciative of the gesture. (In my opinion, it was a "nursing home" 🎂😯moment.)

“There’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear ‘Happy Birthday,’ ” Trump told the crowd. “You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.”

Dump Trump💩❗

Trump avoids talking about his age. But he and his Republican cronies can’t stop talking about President Biden’s age, especially when manipulating false images of the president.

Given Biden and Trump’s birth years — 1942 and 1946, respectively — age was always going to be a factor in the upcoming presidential election. But Republicans, as usual, aren’t letting facts block efforts to prove that only Biden’s age is a political liability. In recent days, conservative media has been churning out what are called “cheap fakes,” doctored videos from public events that attempt to show Biden as doddering, confused, or, in one video, “frozen.”

Every lie, including those amplified by Trump’s handpicked Republican National Committee, was debunked by reporters who covered these events and by the Biden campaign. On X, Andrew Bates, the president’s senior deputy press secretary, wrote, “Fresh off being fact-checked by at least six mainstream outlets for lying about POTUS with cheap fakes, Rupert Murdoch’s sad little super PAC, the New York Post, is back to disrespecting its readers and itself once again. Their ethical standards could deal with a little unfreezing.”

Of course, once this nonsense is spewed out by the GOP’s right-wing hate machine, getting all the viral lies exposed and rounded up is like herding cats. And being revealed as mendacious lemmings has never stopped Republicans from continuing to spread mistruths.

Trump is a convicted felon❗ He allegedly conspired to overturn a fair election simply because he lost. He makes fascistic threats of revenge against his perceived enemies. No wonder he wants voters to instead focus on Biden’s age. That’s why House Republicans recently held US Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress after he refused to turn over Justice Department audio from special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden that was part of an investigation into the president’s handling of classified documents.

In his report released in February, Hur concluded that Biden should not face criminal charges. That’s not what Trump, who had already been indicted for mishandling classified documents, wanted to hear. But Hur, a Trump appointee, still gave his former boss something nearly as damaging to Biden — his gratuitous opinion on the president’s mental acuity. He branded Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Except for the parts about being sympathetic and well-meaning, one could make the same argument about Trump, who has experienced his own share of memory lapses, which are probably normal at this point in his life. And that’s why his relentless attacks on Biden’s age smack of desperation.

It’s always worth remembering how much Trump’s insults against his political opponents reveal his own self-projection. As a Republican candidate and his party’s nominee in 2016, Trump often talked about how a potential Hillary Clinton presidency would be riddled with criminal investigations. He encouraged “lock her up” chants at rallies to bolster false perceptions of her alleged criminality, and used that phrase himself, though he now claims he did no such thing. (Trump lies about everything😠💥❗)

Instead, there’s been an array of former Trump administration officials and allies who’ve spent time behind bars for various crimes — including Steve Bannon who’s been ordered to turn himself in on July 1 to start his prison sentence for contempt of Congress. 

Oh, and Trump is still facing dozens of felony charges in three jurisdictions.

Trump also recently mocked the physical appearances of Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and onetime stalwart Trump supporter, even though, like those men, Trump could also be described as full-figured.

At 81, is Biden moving slower these days? Does he misspeak? Absolutely. But do Republicans portray his lifelong stutter as a sign of mental incompetence? Also, yes. As he did during his generally well-received State of the Union address in March, Biden must continue to prove that he remains sharp and capable of serving another term as this nation’s chief executive.

But at some point, and soon, there needs to be a serious discussion about age limits for presidential candidates. If there’s a minimum age to be president — 35 — there should also be a maximum age. 

Until then, Republicans doing Trump’s bidding can pretend there’s only one senior citizen presidential candidate jousting with the ravages of time as they ignore the lapses of their favored candidate, a man who no longer finds anything happy about yet another birthday.