Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Campaigning for his re-election to the White House in 2024, Republican hopeful Donald Trump lampooned his predecessor, Joe Biden, for his age-related problems. Now, at least 61 percent Americans polled think their current President is growing ‘erratic’ as he ages!
Most Americans think their country’s political leadership is generally too old! Trump returned to office at age 78, becoming the oldest president on inauguration day in US history.
Only 45 percent of respondents in the February 2026 poll said they would describe Trump as “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges,” down from 54 percent in September 2023 during his first term as the US President.
His overall popularity has, however, changed little in recent months. Some 40 percent of respondents in the latest poll approved of Trump’s performance as President, up two percentage points from earlier this month, the media reported on Wednesday.
The six-day poll concluded on Monday, the day before Trump delivered his Annual State of the Union address to the US Congress, following a month of angry reprimands of lawmakers and judges.
According to the poll, six in ten Americans, including a significant segment of his own Republican Party, think Trump has become erratic as he ages.
At least 61 percent of respondents in the poll said they would describe Trump as having “become erratic with age.” Some 89 percent of Democrats, 30 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of independents also described him similarly.
The White House did not comment.
While Trump started his second term at the White House on January 20, 2025, with a considerably higher rating at 47 percent, his approval has held within a point or two of its current level since April that year.
Around 79 percent of poll respondents agreed that “elected officials in Washington, DC, are too old to represent most Americans.” The average age in the US Senate is about 64, and in the US House of Representatives, it’s 58.
Democratic respondents were slightly more likely to call for younger politicians, with 58 percent of them saying top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, 75, was too old to work in government.
In his second term, Trump has unveiled new policies and proposals at a dizzying pace, ordering sweeping tariffs on imports from dozens of countries and deploying masked federal agents across the country to crack down on unauthorized immigration.
He has often struck an angry tone in his public remarks, including last week when he said he was “absolutely ashamed” that the conservative-leaning US Supreme Court struck down many of his tariffs as illegal. Trump even reinstated a series of new tariffs, arguing he could do so under a different legal authority. In November 2025, he assaulted Democratic lawmakers who urged members of the US military to refuse any illegal orders, calling them traitors who could face execution.
Trump won the 2024 presidential election in part because his predecessor in the White House – Democrat Joe Biden – was widely seen to have lost mental acuity as he aged in office. Biden ended his tenure at age 82 – older than any president in US history. Trump is on track to beat that record and will be 80 in June.
Republicans continue to see the President as sharp, with 81 percent of them describing Trump that way in the latest poll, little changed from the 2023 survey. Among Democrats, the share seeing the President able to deal with challenges fell from 29 percent to 19 percent. Among people who don’t identify with either political party, 36 percent saw Trump holding onto his mental acuity, down from 53 percent in 2023.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted online, surveyed 4,638 US adults nationwide and had a margin of error of two percentage points.
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