Let me start with the stories of two men, who each had an outsize impact on my life.

The first was Mike Gunther, who years ago was my shrink. He was the wisest person I ever met and helped me become much closer to who I longed to be. He was 70 when I first started seeing him, and when that ended, he remained my friend. He was lucky enough to age well. He continued to see patients until he was 80, when he voluntarily decided to close shop. Not long after that, during one of our periodic visits, he told me that he had taken his car keys away from himself.

Given the struggles about driving that I’d had with both my parents, I was heartened and impressed by Mike’s decision to give it up. I knew, because I still sometimes sought important advice from him, that he remained as incisive as ever. Unlike many older people unwilling to take a permanent place in the passenger seat, he did not think he was, essentially, accepting imminent death. He had even remarried and started another life adventure after the death of his first wife. But part of his credo of aging responsibly included the mandate to accept the fact he was no longer as capable of doing everything he once was.

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The second man I want to mention is Wallace Stegner, the revered American author, who also had a great impact on me. Wally became my teacher in 1970 when, after college, I was lucky enough to win a fellowship at Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Wally had founded. By my lights, he was a great person. He was a figuratively ambidextrous writer who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award as a novelist and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction. He was a gifted teacher whose lessons about writing I still repeat. And he was a signal figure in the environmental movement, whose loving work about the American West made a vivid case for the urgent efforts required to preserve that landscape.

He was also a person of uncommon decency and a loyal friend. Like Mike, Wally was lucky enough to remain intellectually keen into late age. He published his last book in 1992, at 83. He died the following year in Santa Fe of the injuries he suffered in a car crash. His last words, at least as they were recounted to me by a family friend: “What was I thinking, behind the wheel, a man of my age?” Even great humans need somebody to take away the car keys, if they lack the mettle to do it themselves.

I remind myself regularly of these stories because I myself am now looking straight down the barrel of age 75, which I will reach next April. I continue to write every day, and relish the intensity of the work, which my publishers and editors and, hopefully, readers still seem to welcome. Except for one case I continue to pursue, I have retired from the practice of law, but judging by the reactions of colleagues, I still seem to exhibit rather commendable analytical skills on questions of law and strategy. And I enjoy a full life with a woman I am absolutely mad for. Not unlike the 77-year-old main character in the sequel to Presumed Innocent I am now writing, I too “still feel the force of life bounding through me as unequivocally as it did when I was six years old.”

Fully alive, yes, but not with the same capacities I had 30 years ago. My children applauded me when, after I turned 70, I accepted the need for hearing aids. On the golf course, I have moved up to the senior tees. Various musculoskeletal issues have compromised my balance, and my right knee has balked recently at climbing stairs. And my senior moments are getting worse. Recently, I went through two full weeks before I could remind myself of the name of the Galápagos. In fact, almost every proper noun eludes me after a glass of wine.

Although I have not had a moving violation since the 20th century, I recently told my wife, who is 15 years younger, what simple good sense counsels: namely, that she should be the one to drive when we go out at night. Most important, I know I do not have the fortitude to carry on as I did decades ago when I was trying lawsuits—the most demanding work of my lifetime—while never missing my publisher’s deadlines.

Which brings me to consider a fourth man—after Mike, Wally, and me. I refer, of course, to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Being president of the United States is, without doubt, the hardest job in the world. Even today, I would never trust myself, metaphorically speaking, with the nation’s car keys, let alone if I were several years older, as is the case with both of the likely nominees. President Joe Biden would be 82 on Inauguration Day, 2025, and Donald Trump would be approaching 79.

Right now, many Americans seem to be reenacting Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes with willful blindness to the effects of age on the candidates they prefer. It is fanciful to expect Trump, who has always judged all issues solely by what feeds his consuming ego, to bow even to Father Time. But Joe Biden was elected because we expected better behavior from him.

Biden currently trails Trump in virtually every opinion poll in nearly all of the key swing states. The political pros in the Democratic Party want to see this as a mirage. Polls a year before an election are meaningless, they say. The conventional wisdom about what decides American presidential elections is captured by the mantra of Bill Clinton’s first campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” I have always thought the measure of a strong economy is a robust jobs market. Our unemployment numbers are at record lows. Yet approval ratings for Biden’s job performance are in the tank, hovering near 40%. Many Democratic insiders tell themselves that it’s inflation that’s the problem, the prices people are seeing at the grocery store and the gas pump. Inflation is trending down, they note, and judging by the recent surge in the stock market, Wall Street thinks the economy will be great in 2024. Ergo, they maintain that Biden will pull it out.

All of this, of course, turns a deaf ear to what voters, forthrightly, are saying bothers them about Biden. He is old. Very old. An August AP-NORC poll found that 77% of Americans think he’s too old to serve effectively in his next term, including 69% of Democrats. And here’s the rub: They’ve got a point. The Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables reveal that a full one third of American males who are 82 years old will die before they reach 86. The death of a president is a calamity for any democracy because it leaves the country, often for years at a time, without the leader they have chosen. And death is not the only bad thing more probable to befall a person of advanced age. Increasing age is the biggest risk factor for cancer. How do we feel about chemo brain in the Oval Office?

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I know by many measures Biden is arguably healthier than the average 81-year-old. He exercises regularly. His weight is under excellent control and he has no known medical issues more serious than A-fib. But unfortunately, Biden looks his age. Whether or not you buy the rumors in the tabloids and right-wing outlets that he has undergone some cosmetic procedure, his brow on occasion seems immobile and he can sometimes face the TV camera with a kind of dead-man’s stare. Arthritis in his spine and neuropathy in his feet have given him a stiffened, mincing gait. I do not accept the myth of Biden’s steep cognitive decline, which has been a virtual meme on Fox News since Inauguration Day. People I know who’ve been Biden’s friends for decades swear he is as sharp as ever, and I remain impressed by his facility in interactions with the press.

But Biden has been a chronic stutterer, whose proneness to gaffes is well-known—and that’s not getting better. Like me and my old friend Galápagos, he’s had some embarrassing senior moments, such as a White House event last year where he tried to point out an Indiana congresswoman whose death he’d publicly mentioned the month before. Don’t even get me started on Trump in this regard; I’ve listened to him fumble and stumble during speech after speech. He sometimes seems to be on a mind-altering drug—or on another planet.

Let me acknowledge that there are unfair elements to this criticism of Biden. First, since nobody has a crystal ball, the best indication of whether Biden can do the job tomorrow is how he’s doing the job today, and by my gauge, that’s very well. After a lifetime in DC, he understands the pathos and comedy of getting bills through Congress, and despite the nation’s toxic political divisions, he engineered the passage of legislation like the Infrastructure Act, or the first gun control measure adopted in years. He has restored America’s standing with our foreign friends, while he has confronted the threats from China and Russia. Month after month, he has withstood the incredible rigors of the job, especially the frequent round-the-world travel—even to war zones like Ukraine, or now, Israel—without failing to perform when he gets off the plane.

The other thing to be said on Biden’s behalf is that Trump is no better bet, even if your concern is simply age. Yes, with his orange dye job, shellacked comb-over, and bombastic manner, Trump often appears more vital. But Trump, if he is voted in next November, would answer the American people’s concerns about Biden’s age by supplanting Biden as the oldest person ever elected to the office. Like Biden, his chances of getting through four years are far from certain. One in four American men aged 79 don’t live to 83. Furthermore, because Trump is overweight, loves cheeseburgers, exhibits bouts of debilitating anger, and generally refuses to exercise, a 2020 analysis of both men’s medical records by seven professors of health and aging concluded that the odds are that Trump will die before Biden, notwithstanding their age difference.

Trump is at risk for heart disease and has a family history of dementia. Indeed, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s former White House director of strategic communications, commented recently on national television, “He is not as sharp as he was in 2016, and many of us would argue that he wasn’t that sharp then. You see a real decline in him.” In late October, on a trip to Iowa, Trump forgot the name of the city he was in, mistaking it for a place in South Dakota.

So far, many Democrats are reluctant to hit on Trump’s age-related problems for fear that they are only elevating their own candidate’s greatest weakness. But isn’t their best rebuttal on age to invite a side-by-side comparison on a debate stage, a step Trump has been conspicuously unwilling to take with his Republican competitors for the nomination?

Probably the worst aspect of a Biden-versus-Trump rematch in prime time is the precedent it will set, since one of these men, too old to serve, will get elected, creating a template that might encourage others in many endeavors to stay on after their time. Risking accusations of ageism, I would like to propose that we are long overdue for a national conversation about aging responsibly. The remarkable advances of medicine in the last century have extended lifespans, especially for the well-to-do. According to the Equality of Opportunity Project, rich American men outlive poor men by a full 15 years; among females in the US, wealthier women survive a decade longer than poorer women. (And of course, throughout the industrialized world, the lifespan of women is about four to six years longer than that of men.)

What are called “the oldest old,” 85 and beyond, comprise the fastest-growing segment of the American population. We should welcome this fact, wholeheartedly, yet we should do so without pretending that aging has no consequence. Setting limits for oneself and one’s loved ones, and acknowledging the inevitable deficits that come with time, needs to be taken as the first responsibility of living a longer life.

During Barack Obama’s time in office, roundabout messages were telegraphed by people in power to quietly suggest to Ruth Bader Ginsburg that she consider retiring from her seat on the US Supreme Court while the Democrats held the Senate, and as a result, could expect to confirm a far younger replacement. Instead, Justice Ginsburg held on. She died at 87 while Trump was in office, which let him name Amy Coney Barrett to replace her. The result was the overturning of Roe v. Wade, for which Justice Barrett provided the critical fifth vote. A confirmed feminist who had been the legal architect for many major advances in women’s rights, RBG allowed the predictable stubbornness of old age to set fire to her legacy and, in certain ways, catapult American women back 50 years.

Joe Biden, sadly, seems to be headed down a similar path. His greatest historical achievement by far was saving the American people from four more years of antidemocratic lunacy from Donald Trump, a man who has already orchestrated an insurrection. President Biden, by insisting on pursuing reelection, instead of stepping aside and allowing Democratic voters to choose his most able potential successor through the primary process, is now forcing the American people to make a perilous choice between what they perceive to be the greater danger—Biden’s age or Trump’s chaotic personality and autocratic fervor. Given the hazards of a second Trump term, which Biden would be the first to articulate, he is putting our entire democracy at risk, so he, like countless older people before him, can clutch the car keys until they grow cold in his hand.

Scott Turow is a Vanity Fair contributor. He is the author of 15 books, including Presumed Innocent and his latest, Suspect.