The cat’s out of the bag: President Joe Biden is old. He knows it. His political opponents know it. And the news is happy to remind voters of it. But his staff — as well as his wife — just wish he would at least acknowledge that he’s no spring chicken and adjust his schedule accordingly.

Axios’s Alex Thompson appeared on CNN This Morning on Tuesday to discuss his detailed new report about frustration in Biden’s inner circle over the president pushing himself harder and harder, the way he did years ago. Despite his eagerness to be the same workhorse he has been for decades, even telling aides, “I feel so much younger than my age,” he is, in fact 81 years old. Those decades of experience add up, but Biden appears to want to ignore them. Thompson wrote:

Current and former aides say Biden is extraordinarily energetic for his age. But his repeated insistence that he feels so young can draw eye rolls: Some current and former aides believe Biden doesn’t realize how old he can come across. …

Biden pushing up against his limits sometimes creates a cycle in which he wears himself out, then appears fatigued during public events — which can increase concerns about his age, even when he’s taking on a rigorous schedule.

“He is his own worst enemy when it comes to his schedule,” a former Biden aide said.

Thompson also reported that First Lady Dr. Jill Biden has taken an active role in trying to get her husband to pull back, eat better, rest more, and travel less. Biden acknowledged in his 2017 memoir titled, “Promise Me, Dad,” that even while he was vice president, his wife would try to rein him in:

“Joe’s working too hard,” Jill would tell Biden’s then-chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, Joe Biden recalled in his memoir, Promise Me, Dad. “He’s exhausted. He’s not sleeping. It’s going to kill him.”

During his appearance on CNN This Morning, Thompson told anchors Poppy Harlow and Phil Mattingly that staffers try to “get him to do a little bit less and make sure that he gets enough rest so that he can present as more vigorous. Because some of it is not just the number of events you do, it’s how you look when you do the few events that you do. And that’s sort of where this tension is going.”

But he added: “I think everyone that I’ve talked to on the team is really struck and think basically what Biden is doing at his age is extraordinary. I think the tension comes, is that he does not understand that he cannot do as much as he did 10, 15 years ago.”

Watch the video above via CNN.

The post ‘He Is His Own Worst Enemy’: Axios Reports on Frustration Inside Biden Camp Over President’s Unwillingness to Accept His Age first appeared on Mediaite.

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